Health Catalyst Acquires Able Health For USD 27M

Analytics company Health Catalyst announced this week its acquisition of San Francisco-based Able Health, a cloud-based quality and regulatory measurement tracking and reporting company, for $27 million.

Why It Matters
Health Catalyst officials say the acquisition will bolster the company’s existing quality and regulatory measures capabilities, due in part to Able Health SaaS application, which automates measures reporting.

Health Catalyst’s DOS cloud-based data platform is powered by data from more than 100 million patient records, and the company counts Allina Hospitals and Clinics, Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, Partners Healthcare, the University of Michigan, Intermountain Healthcare and UPMC among its clients.

Through the integration with Health Catalyst’s DOS platform, the Able Health’s solution will be augmented by a data sourcing and integration backbone for the measures engine, capable of ingesting data from hundreds of different data sources.

Among the company’s other services is the Corus suite of activity-based costing and cost insights applications, designed to help drive transparency on the cost of patient care and spot opportunities to improve outcomes by offering integration of patient-level EHR data and departmental and equipment resource-utilization data.

The Largest Trend
Health Catalyst argues that in order to build a more sustainable healthcare system, organizations must be able to leverage data to boost quality, identify and address waste and reduce the total cost of care.

“There is a trillion dollars of waste in the U.S. healthcare system, 30 cents of every dollar,” Health Catalyst CFO Patrick Nelli told Healthcare IT News upon the company’s IPO this past summer.

“We are in the early innings of the digitization of healthcare,” he said. “A lot of our customers have only had information in a digital format available to them over the last several years. So that means we are just scratching the surface when we think about these types of various use-cases for using data to help these organizations drive improvements.

On the Record
“Able Health’s measures engine, powered by DOS, will bring great value to our customers by further relieving the massive burden of regulatory measures,” said Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst, in a statement. “Furthermore, this demonstrates Health Catalyst’s ability to integrate and scale software applications on top of our DOS platform.”

“The combined Health Catalyst and Able Health solution will further reduce the administrative burden of quality reporting and allow care teams to focus on patient care, a key to making value-based care work for providers and patients,” added Able Health CEO Rachel Katz.-Healthcare IT News