Data sharing technology company Datavant announced it has acquired Ontellus, a records retrieval company.
In a statement, Datavant said the acquisition will create a "fourth business vertical, legal and insurance, focused on simplifying the secure, compliant exchange of clinical and billing data between providers and requesters, including legal and insurance professionals."
Davavant's platform allows healthcare records to move between organizations, including hospitals and clinics. The platform also protects data via compliance and security offerings.
Ontellus is a procurer of medical, wage and employment records, diagnostic imaging files, pharmaceutical data, social security records, billing records and other claims-related data services.
Vince Cole, former Ontellus CEO, will head the new business. He will report directly to Kyle Armbrester, Datavant CEO.
"Every hour we can save from the task of exchanging health records is an hour that can be used for patient care," Kyle Armbrester, Datavant CEO, said in a statement.
"By bringing together Datavant and Ontellus, we will transform what has been a largely manual, time consuming process for both making and fulfilling health record requests to a more efficient, digital process that allows providers and requesters to spend more time on higher value activities."
THE LARGER TREND
In July, Datavant announced its commitment to becoming a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Aligned Network.
As part of the commitment, the company said it would accelerate initiatives that were already underway to make health information compliantly accessible, secure and actionable.
In May, Datavant acquired Aetion, a company focused on real-world evidence in healthcare. Aetion provides real-world evidence offerings to biopharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, payers and regulators.
Aetion joined Datavant to offer an end-to-end real-world evidence platform, allowing healthcare and life sciences companies to respond to research questions about the clinical impact of therapies in development and in-market.
The companies said they would leverage their capabilities to create an end-to-end offering on data discovery, linkage, privacy, curation and advanced analysis, allowing their ecosystem and life sciences partners to create analytics-based insights.
That same month, Datavant expanded its collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim to support Boehringer's real-world evidence initiatives.
The extended collaboration aimed to leverage Datavant's privacy-preserving tokenization and data connectivity technologies to strengthen clinical development and initiate strategies across 75 additional clinical trials and multiple new molecular entities.
Through Datavant Connect, a platform that helps balance data utility with data privacy, Boehringer will be able to adeptly explore and evaluate third-party data sources without moving or sharing underlying data.
By applying Datavant's technology across a broad portfolio of trials and launches, Boehringer Ingelheim aims to increase the integration of real-world data into drug development.
In 2019, Ontellus acquired ChartSwap, a business-to-business health information exchange that connects a network of records providers with requestors.
