NASHVILLE, Tennessee—As both regulatory and market forces are pushing the industry toward more transparency in healthcare pricing, MultiPlan sees opportunities to be a bigger player in data and tech for providers, payers and employers.
The data analytics company, which has been in the market for 45 years, launched a rebrand at the ViVE 2025 digital health conference on Monday.
Rebranded Claritev, the company is focused on developing new products and technologies that provide data insights to a broader swath of the healthcare market. Providing "actionable insights" to healthcare organizations will be a key part of the company's growth, Travis Dalton, chairman, CEO and president, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview in the lead-up to the ViVE 2025 event.
"I want us to be seen more as the health tech company we are," he said.
Dalton sees Claritev as playing a key role in the ongoing conversation around transparency and affordability in healthcare as he sees data and technology as critical tools to help drive down costs.
The company will also start trading with a new ticker, "CTEV," on the New York Stock Exchange starting Feb. 28.
MultiPlan was initially founded as a New York-based hospital network. In the past nearly five decades, it has grown into a tech and data analytics solutions company and one of the country's largest third-party networks. The company works with the top 15 major health insurers and about 700 total insurers along with 100,000 employers and 60 million consumers, according to executives.
Dalton, who joined the company nearly a year ago, believes there are misconceptions about MultiPlan and its capabilities. The company is known for its data-driven cost management services and analytics to help tackle out-of-network medical bills.
But that is just one of Claritev's services, Dalton said.
"We've got a large provider network, about 1.4 million providers that that we serve and work with everyday. We provide a lot of access to care in that way," he said.
The company's offerings include data science tools and price transparency data platforms. "That's really the future of healthcare, and the future of the company," Dalton said.
In December, MultiPlan rolled out CompleteVue, software built using publicly available price transparency data that provides advanced analytics to help health systems and providers gain insight into the healthcare market.
Recent legislation has brought incremental improvements in healthcare price transparency. The company makes the case that providers struggle to turn the complexities of large sets of unmanageable data into actionable information.
In 2023, the company acquired analytics and AI company Benefits Science Technologies for $160 million. At the time of the deal, BST, founded in 2012 by MIT-trained experts, offered a software-as-a-service platform that connected with over 160 carriers and plan administrators. Claritev made BST's technology the foundation of its BenInsights platform, which optimizes financial and clinical decision-making for around 75,000 employers.
"These are healthcare topics. Those aren't payer cost topics," Dalton insisted.
Dalton spent 21 years at electronic health record company Cerner as chief client and services officer and president of its government services arm. Oracle bought Cerner in June 2022 for $28.3 billion. Dalton contends that healthcare is once again evolving following the digitization of the industry about 15 years ago and the push toward interoperability.
"I still remember our CEO, Neil Patterson, all the time saying, 'The most dangerous thing in healthcare is the pen,'" Dalton said, referring to the longtime healthcare IT executive who championed computing and digital transformation in healthcare.
"The early 2000s were about taking the pen out of healthcare, and then interoperability became the big word. I actually think we're moving into a time where transparency with actionable insight will be the most important thing, because we have so much data now, but not everyone knows what to do with it. My view is a lot of times in healthcare, you end up with problem admiration, not an actionable insight," he said. "Claritev can serve a broader continuum of constituents than the company had in the past. We now have market segments focused on not just payer, but direct-to-employer, government, provider market segment and partners."
In January, the company inked a tech partnership with Oracle to consolidate its cloud infrastructure on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and update its tech. Dalton said the company made a "nine-figure investment" with Oracle in its cloud infrastructure, and this will help Claritev use its data to build new solutions serving more healthcare organizations, Dalton said.
"We want to provide a data platform, that really allows to take all that publicly available data, sift through it and make it usable and insightful. I could envision us creating publicly available APIs off of a data platform that uses public data," Dalton said, noting these services would be beneficial to value-based care companies and managed care companies working to capitate risk.
"We're going to work on that middle layer on healthcare. As a health tech company, we've seen 40 years of claims data, we're adding quality data and bringing those two things together, I think, is where we start to get interesting and unique," Dalton said. "We've really opened the aperture on what we do and who we work with, in addition to new business models and how we try to sell into the market," he said.
The rebrand comes as the company tries to steer the conversation about its work in healthcare in the wake of public scrutiny and a spate of lawsuits. Claritev found itself in the public’s crosshairs following a critical New York Times investigation published last May that alleged the company—which works with big names like UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Aetna—is incentivized to drive down payments to providers in exchange for processing fees.
Following that investigation, influential senators sent demands for information on the company’s business model and called for federal agencies to investigate potential collusion. The American Hospital Association called for a Department of Labor investigation into MultiPlan and others like it that contract with payers to reprice out-of-network service payments.
In 2023, 50-hospital health system AdventHealth filed a lawsuit alleging MultiPlan’s business model of contracting with fellow payers and aggressively repricing out-of-network service payments is anticompetitive under federal law.
Claritev and its partner health insurers are pushing back against antitrust allegations from numerous provider organizations, filing last month a motion to dismiss their collective lawsuit. Individual health systems and the American Medical Association have filed cases against Claritev, leading to multidistrict litigation consolidating dozens of plaintiff complaints. They accuse the company of forming agreements with insurers—UnitedHealth Group, Elevance Health, Aetna and Cigna are listed as "co-conspirators"—to set out-of-network prices using a common collective data set and methodology as opposed to competing with each other individually.
Legal representation for the company and the partner insurers also noted that "numerous" similar lawsuits brought against it in the past—including by some of the consolidated complaint—have been dismissed for failing to make an antitrust case.
"Our view is that the lawsuits are absolutely without merit," Dalton told Fierce Healthcare. "We think that if those suits were successful, ultimately you're going to see increases in prices for patients and employers."
While Claritev, previously MultiPlan, has been viewed as playing a contentious role between providers and payers, Dalton contends that data-driven solutions and tech, including artificial intelligence, can provide mutual value.
"We think that a big part of the future is going to be that intersection of those three constituents—providers, payers and employers—that all have equal and good information that allow for the best decisions to be to be made," he said.