Kyruus, a provider data management vendor, is acquiring Epion Health, a patient engagement platform.
Together, the companies will reach more than 500 health systems and medical groups with solutions like provider search, scheduling, patient check-in and payment collection. The acquisition signals a strategic expansion from Kyruus, now serving the medical group market.
“The powerful combination of our platforms will make connecting with patients easier for providers and healthcare organizations of all sizes, in all markets, driving engagement in high-quality care that is convenient, accessible and efficient,” Epion CEO Joe Blewitt said in an announcement.
Epion’s core product is a customizable digital check-in tool, and its primary clients have historically been smaller practices. The company intentionally started downmarket, Blewitt told Fierce Healthcare, to fine-tune its offering before scaling. Since then, it has worked its way up to bigger organizations, some representing 2,000 providers each, Blewitt added.
Kyruus, by contrast, has had the opposite business model—starting with bigger clients and now expanding downmarket. “We’re kind of meeting right in the middle,” Blewitt said.
Kyruus’ interest in the acquisition piqued following existing customer requests, CEO Graham Gardner, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare. Smaller medical groups wanted help with digitized patient intake; payers, too, expressed their vested interest in improved workflows at community providers. The bigger you can make your network, they told Kyruus, the better.
Epion will now connect its more than 11,000 providers to payers through Kyruus' other key solution, HealthSparq, which it acquired in 2021. The integrated Kyruus-HealthSparq platforms bridge personalized plan benefits with real-time provider availability and enable health systems to access health plan sites to engage patients.
No major modifications to Epion’s product are expected as it begins to work with Kyruus. “It’s essentially the same workflow, it's just a matter of different integration points,” Blewitt said. Given how complicated healthcare already is, “the more you can stitch together the different features into one platform,” Gardner echoed, “the easier it is.” The new solution will go to market immediately thanks to the companies’ use of each other’s APIs.
Post-acquisition, executives said, Epion will maintain its own brand, but that will continue to be evaluated as Kyruus grows. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the deal.