Acquisition Aims To Improve Communication Between Physicians, Insurers
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Nantworks and Nanthealth complete the acquisition of NaviNet.
NantWorks and its majority-owned subsidiary NantHealth have announced the acquisition of NaviNet, Inc., a healthcare technology company of payer-provider collaboration solutions. According to a company statement, the acquisition “scales NantHealth’s cloud-based platform of services to deliver interoperability, connectivity, real-time decision support, and a single sign-on operating system to over 450,000 active provider users and all-payer access to 450+ commercial and government plans nationally, covering almost 100 million lives and over 30 million monthly transactions.”
This acquisition is designed to improve the communication between physicians and insurers to ensure the best health outcomes possible. The IT company sees the NaviNet platform as a tool to increase communication between the two groups at the point of care — such as connecting patients to clinical trials based on their cancer’s molecular profile.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Founder and CEO of NantHealth said, “By combining NaviNet Open’s applications — eligibility and benefits from more than 450 commercial and government plans, referrals, authorizations, document exchange, claims management, and more — with NantHealth’s interoperability, decision support, and connectivity platforms and with NantOmics supercomputer predictive modeling platforms, we are now poised to be the nation’s leading healthcare collaboration network by transforming the payer-provider relationship to evolve from transactions to interactions and finally to collaboration.”
Soon-Shiong said NantHealth is in the process of creating “a knowledge engine,” according to Modern Healthcare, that combines big data with personalized medicine. To date, the process has been focused on changing the treatment paradigm for cancer.
“Moreover, leveraging NaviNet’s nationwide network across more than 170,000 active provider offices and 2,000 hospital settings will allow us to reach more doctors with our genomics, decision support, and connectivity solutions to enable better care coordination at lower costs for patients. The combination of leading-edge genomic science and best-in-class applications, delivered through NantHealth, will be critical for winning the wars against cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases.”
Soon-Shiong explained, “Our dream was to address the cognitive overload that faces clinicians today especially in the complexity of cancer, and support community oncologists as well as major academic centers. Finally, we have the infrastructure in place to make this a reality. The reason we’ve acquired NaviNet is not what it currently is but what it will be. Here’s an opportunity to really have this bidirectional communication tool.”
NaviNet, which originally started as a network to provide physicians direct insurance information about patients, has expanded into population health where, for example, insurers prompt providers about upcoming screening tests. NaviNet was previously owned by three health plans including Highmark, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey and Independence Blue Cross, and software company Lumeris.