Kyruus is acquiring HealthSparq, a healthcare guidance and transparency technology company serving the health payer market from Cambia Health Solutions, a Portland, Oregon-based health plan and solutions company.
Officials at Boston-based Kyruus—a company that offers provider search, scheduling, and data management—are expecting the combined entity will serve more than 60 health systems and 100 health plan brands across the U.S.
"The companies actually have very aligned visions and cultures. We both were started to improve how we connect patients to care," said Graham Gardner, M.D. in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
"We chose to do that starting on the health system side. We thought it was important to get accurate data and the ability to schedule or transact and integrate with electronic health records," Gardner said. "Healthsparq, because of their affiliation with Cambia, started on the payer side and wanted to bring transparency, particularly transparency around cost."
Kyruus and Healthsparq may have started on opposite sides of the payer-provider divide, but they found they had multiple shared customers including Geisinger Health which has both a health system and health plan.
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"As we both saw success in our own markets, we both saw that really coordinating care was going to require bridging across health systems and health plans," Gardner said. "We had the chance to meet last year and began talking about partnerships and the more we got to know each other's cultures and core values, the more we realized together we could reduce any friction and really be able to offer a really compelling platform to the industry."
Combining operations will accelerate the integration of their platforms in order to enable health plans to link personalized insurance benefit and cost information with rich provider data while allowing health systems to tap into health plan websites as a new patient engagement source, officials said.
Over time, the unified platform will facilitate increasingly sophisticated patient routing and matching across channels and give patients more convenient online scheduling.
Kyruus is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal. But they did say Cambia will have an ownership stake and a seat on the Kyruus Board of Directors.
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They join other board members with deep industry experience such as Aaron Martin, who is executive vice president and chief digital officer at Providence health system and managing general partner of Providence Ventures. SalesForce is also an investor in Kyruus.
Mark Menton, CEO of HealthSparq, will join the Kyruus executive team and serve as General Manager of the health plan business unit.
“We’ve grown up as part of Cambia, so understanding health plans is in our DNA and that insight allows us, as part of Kyruus, to help make healthcare access a seamless experience between patients, plans, and providers," Menton said in a statement.