Dive Brief:
- Centene has completed its acquisition of analytics firm Apixio as part of its ongoing bid to digitize its back-end functions, the payer announced Tuesday.
- San Francisco-based Apixio takes in patient data from sources like physician notes and electronic health records and analyzes it using artificial intelligence, with the goal of bolstering healthcare organizations' administrative functions.
- Financial terms of the buy, which closed about a month after it was first announced on Nov. 9, were not disclosed.
Dive Insight:
Similar to its peers, Centene is increasingly working to weave technology into its operations and administrative functions in a bid to cut down on waste and save money. The Apixio transaction is part of that strategy, meant to complement Centene's existing data analytics offerings while bolstering support for value-based payments, according to a Tuesday statement.
Eleven-year-old Apixio will remain an operationally independent entity as part of Centene's Health Care Enterprises group and will continue to work with existing clients and sell to the industry at large, now with the benefit of Centene's heft behind it. The payer's Health Care Enterprises segment currently hosts five businesses, including Interpreta, a clinical and genomic data analytics company, and Casenet, a population health and medical management platform.
Before its acquisition, Apixio raised more than $50 million across eight rounds of funding. The private company said in September it expected 2020 revenue to grow by 50% compared to 2019 due to rising demand for analytics from major payers managing government-sponsored plans — a key market for Centene, the biggest Medicaid managed care organization and largest provider of plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Both Medicaid and ACA plans have seen rising consumer demand this year as the COVID-19 recession left millions without employer-sponsored health insurance. Along with lower healthcare utilization, those trends have benefited players like Centene, which has reported rising membership and profits it said it plans to reinvest in the business.
In the third quarter, Centene reported a profit of $568 million, almost six times higher than its net earnings for the same period last year.