Availity on Tuesday announced its plan to acquire Diameter Health, which develops technology for clinical data quality and interoperability.

WHY IT MATTERS
Availity, the nationwide health information network, plans to integrate Diameter Health's Upcycling Data technology into its own clinical data gateway, with the goal to build out an interoperability platform for clinical and claims data.

The companies hope to complete the transaction during the third quarter of 2022; additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The aim is to help Availity's customers better manage value-based care arrangements – offering easier information exchange between providers, health plans and others, and normalizing structured and unstructured clinical data for a host of digitally enabled use cases, officials say.

Combining Diameter's API technology and Fusion engine with Availity's Clinical Gateway capabilities will enable health plans, providers and partners to acquire and streamline clinical data acquisition through a broad network of providers, vendors and partners.

It will also help healthcare customers normalize data to industry-standard terminologies, reorganizing and deduplicating disparate data sources. This will enable the creation of longitudinal health records and help with bidirectional and intelligent workflows that support care gap closure, quality measurement, risk adjustment, automated prior authorization, care management and other use cases.

THE LARGER TREND
At HIMSS22 in Orlando this past March, Mark Martin, Availity's vice president of product management, explained how the company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help providers and payers streamline approvals, referrals and claims management.

ON THE RECORD
"This acquisition underscores Availity's strategy to empower providers and health plans to benefit from actionable, real-time, and precise data insights to reduce administrative inefficiencies, maximize revenue potential, and drive quality of care improvements for patients on one scalable platform," Russ Thomas, CEO of Availity, said in a statement.

"Fueled by Diameter's technology, Availity will create the nation's pre-eminent data acquisition and interoperability platform," he added. "We are thrilled to leverage the talents and energy of the Diameter Health team to deliver an integrated clinical and claims data platform that provides real-time, intelligent, bidirectional data workflows and insights."

"Clinical data is tremendously valuable, but the ability to structurally and semantically normalize multisource, multiformat clinical data, and further enrich and deploy that data to drive action is still an emerging capability in healthcare," added Mary Lantin, president and COO of Diameter Health. "By combining our complementary capabilities and sitting at the intersection across providers, health plans and data partners, we have the opportunity to truly disrupt the healthcare industry and break new ground in advancing data intelligence."

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
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