Dive Brief:
- Customer experience firm Qualtrics is acquiring healthcare market research company Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 billion, the companies said Monday.
- The deal will give Qualtrics access to Press Ganey’s extensive healthcare data stores to bolster the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities for customer, employee and patient feedback, according to a press release.
- The purchase, paid to Press Ganey in a combination of cash and equity in Qualtrics, is expected to close “in the coming months,” the firms said.
Dive Insight:
Qualtrics, which is owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, offers software tools and surveys to gauge customer and employee satisfaction to companies in multiple industries, including education, financial services and government.
The firm also operates in the healthcare sector. Qualtrics provides products for analyzing patient experience at health systems, managing regulatory requirements for value-based care and collecting patient feedback on telehealth visits, for example.
Qualtrics has lately doubled down on AI tools, including products for data analysis and agents for automatically handling consumer inquiries.
In August, the firm said it was partnering with Stanford Health Care to build AI agents that could arrange patients’ transportation to appointments and link them to housing and social support if needed, among other capabilities.
Qualtrics plans to use the Press Ganey purchase to dive deeper into healthcare, the company said in a press release Monday.
Press Ganey, owned by private equity firms Leonard Green & Partners and Ares Management, works with 41,000 providers across 30 countries on surveys and patient experience products.
The company has also focused on rolling out AI-backed tools in recent months. Early this year, Press Ganey unveiled products for summarizing data from patient portals, calls and online reviews; generating responses to patient concerns; and detecting potential safety concerns from customer feedback and recommending next steps.
