Bellevue, Wash.-based health software company Edifecs has acquired Talix, a San-Francisco based startup that mines language in health data to optimize billing, analysis and management of patient data with a focus on value-based care. Edifecs announced the deal Monday. Terms were not disclosed.
Value-based care is an increasingly popular healthcare model that de-emphasizes fee-for-service payments in favor of an approach more centered on preventive and primary care. That’s also a growing area of focus for Edifecs, which sells enterprise software to more than 350 healthcare companies including BlueCross BlueShield, Cigna, Humana, GroupHealth, and others.
Talix uses natural language processing, a computational approach to examine language in data, to mine health care data. The startup provides health plans with a platform to support the identification of medical codes for billing, data analysis and patient care management.
Talix’s platform can also assess a patient’s risk for various conditions, a process called risk adjustment that facilitates billing for value-based case systems.
“The merger of these companies enables Edifecs to offer a more complete risk adjustment solution from insight, to intervention, to submission,” said Sunny Singh, Edifecs’ founder and chairman of the board, in a statement. “This, in turn, will advance industry-critical value-based care initiatives by directly supporting providers with their increased acceptance of financial risk.”
Singh originally started Edifecs in a garage as a startup that provided technology solutions for integration problems. In 2001, Edifecs entered the healthcare industry, as it saw opportunities to help customers with transaction and information processing as healthcare made the transition from paper-based data to software. Singh served as Edifecs’ CEO until July, when he handed the reins of the more than 750-employee company to Venkat Kavarthapu.
Edifecs’ services enable interoperability of data across systems, unifying clinical and financial information, and more. Early in the pandemic the company launched a a COVID-19 dashboard to help payers analyze COVID-19 testing claims data. Last year it landed a private equity cash infusion in a deal reportedly valued at $1.4 billion.
Talix was founded in 2015 as part of the information and media technology company Healthline Networks, to apply natural language processing and machine learning to applications relevant for values-based care. In 2016 it became an independent company led by Dean Stephens, formerly CEO of Healthline.
“Our combined capabilities will provide a more powerful and complete solution for health plans and providers to reduce manual, labor-intensive chart retrieval through an advanced, EHR-integrated coding platform,” said Stephens in a statement, referring to the electronic healthcare record.
