PointClickCare to buy Audacious Inquiry

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – PointClickCare Technologies, a leading healthcare technology platform for the long-term care sector, announced its intent to acquire US-based Audacious Inquiry, an industry-shaping connected care platform. The purchase price is said to be US$250 million. The combination of PointClickCare and Audacious Inquiry will help accelerate the companies’ mission to address critical gaps in healthcare and enable better care for vulnerable patients.

According to an article in the Globe and Mail newspaper, the acquisition, PointClickCare’s ninth, will help the Mississauga company continue to broaden its offerings beyond its core business of providing internet-based health-records software to 27,000 nursing homes, retirement facilities and home-health agencies in the United States.

The deal builds on a strategy the company put in place with its December acquisition of Utah-based Collective Medical for more than US$500-million. That deal, the largest in PointClickCare’s history, differed from its past purchases of competing electronic medical records providers. It enabled PointClickCare to start filling gaps in caregiving between acute-care settings such as hospitals and post-acute centres like the ones it was already serving.

Collective’s platform tracks tens of millions of patients across facilities, care organizations and national health plans across America.

With Audacious, PointClickCare is buying a fast-growing company whose software, like Collective’s, is also used to collect and exchange data between facilities that transfer patients so “when someone is discharged from hospital to home or post-acute facility, we want to make sure the doctor knows that is happening and that they have the insights they need” to follow up with patients, Scott Afzal, president of Audacious, said in an interview.

“We are excited to welcome Audacious Inquiry to the PointClickCare community as we build on our proven track record of solving complex problems in healthcare. This acquisition will enable PointClickCare to expand the reach of our solutions by adding Audacious Inquiry’s strong products and network of relationships as the shift to value-based care fuels the growing market demand for intelligence and collaboration tools,” said Dave Wessinger (pictured), chief executive officer of PointClickCare.

Over the past two decades, Audacious Inquiry has built a suite of SaaS solutions supported by strategic advisory services. The company serves as a trusted partner to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as regional health information exchanges (HIEs), hospital associations, state government, public health authorities, health systems, payers, ACOs and other risk-bearing providers.

Together, PointClickCare and Audacious Inquiry will enable care collaboration and value-based care solutions for over 150 million lives across the U.S.

“We are incredibly proud to join the PointClickCare family, where we see alignment with the ambition inherent in our mission – to be the single most impactful platform for transforming care. For more than twenty years, we have collaborated with our partners across the country to build networks that fundamentally improve care collaboration and have supported federal and state agencies in developing and implementing interoperability initiatives. We are excited about the next chapter of our work to improve care quality and patient outcomes through our combination with PointClickCare and our ongoing commitment to our partners,” said Chris Brandt, chief executive officer of Audacious Inquiry.

The two acquisitions will build out his company’s ability to provide “continuity of care” to patients and “add high value” to the network of 2,700 hospitals, 2,000 ambulatory and more than 22,000 long-term and post-acute-care facilities PointClickCare serves in about 30 U.S. states. The company now generates about US$500-million in annual revenue and is growing by about 20 percent per year, factoring out the impact of acquisitions, Mr. Wessinger said.

He added the deals come amid “fairly rapid” changes in the U.S. healthcare software space in recent years that have seen software vendors companies build out their capability, largely through acquisitions, to provide more integrated care offerings for patients. PointClickCare’s competitors include NetSmart Technologies, Inc. WellSky and Bamboo Health.