HMT recently explored the hypothetical challenges, from an IT perspective, that are created during corporate mergers and partnerships. I decided to go one step further with this investigation by contacting four executives who just recently experienced a merger.
Below are the current thoughts and future objectives of Therese Wareham, CEO and Managing Director, Kaufman Hall and Peri Pierone, President, Axiom EPM as well as the statements from Siva Subramanian, PhD, Senior Vice President Mobile Products, Zynx Health and Bertina Yen, MD, MPH, Executive Vice President, Product Group, Zynx Health.
Kaufman Hall's acquisition of Axiom EPM
Therese Wareham, CEO and Managing Director, Kaufman Hall
“Kaufman Hall announced its acquisition of Axiom EPM. This transaction will leverage Kaufman Hall’s industry expertise and Axiom’s innovative cloud software capabilities for advanced planning, modeling, analysis and reporting in healthcare, banking and higher education. This new partnership promises to create new solutions that the market
HMT contacted the CEOs of each company to gather their thoughts on the new partnership as well as their impressions of their future work together.
Healthcare organizations today are grappling with huge challenges – declining reimbursement, regulatory challenges, rapidly changing market conditions, more and more people seeking care now that they have insurance coverage. Providers have to make the right decisions about where to allocate resources – human, financial, facilities – to best meet the needs of their communities and to maintain their financial strength and stability.
Kaufman Hall has provided consulting and software solutions to help our clients meet these challenges for several decades and now the products, services and innovative approach brought to us by Axiom EPM enhance our support for the thousands of healthcare organizations with whom we work.
Kaufman Hall and Axiom have a shared vision of creating excellence – using best-in-class consulting expertise and software tools to support data-driven analysis and decision making and enable long-term success for our clients. Kaufman Hall’s strong presence in healthcare will create significant opportunities for utilization of Axiom’s already in-market tools such as cost accounting and service line analysis, on a unified, cloud platform, that are absolutely critical for healthcare providers dealing with the challenges of healthcare system reform.
Now working together with our clients – in what we think of as real-time R&D – we have unique insight on all of the challenges, the nuances, the changes, the stress points facing healthcare providers today. That insight feeds directly into our software development process so that we can continue to deliver leading-edge solutions.
There is enormous strength built on the synergy of industry-leading consulting expertise and innovative proprietary software. Kaufman Hall’s consulting services and established software install base, combined with Axiom’s sophisticated planning and decision-support capabilities create an organization that meets clients’ needs today and into the foreseeable future.
It’s one plus one equals three.”
Peri Pierone, President, Axiom EPM
“We're very excited to be joining forces with Kaufman Hall. Over the last few years, we have had numerous inquiries from the investment community, but only from a few potential suitors that could create the kind of value and future we were seeking for our customers and employees.
Kaufman Hall represents an outstanding strategic fit in this regard. Both firms share a common strategic mission of driving performance management success. Both companies put customer satisfaction as their top priority – proven with a 100% implementation success and over 97% customer retention over the past 10 years. The combined entity will be unmatched in terms of both strategic management consulting services and innovative, modern software capability.
Providing value to our customers is our top priority. As healthcare organizations face a multitude of uncertainties – from the changes resultant to industry reform to declining reimbursements and shrinking operating margins – performance management has become a means to not only survive, but thrive. By combining Axiom EPM’s proven software platform for financial planning, cost accounting and decision support capabilities with Kaufman Hall’s unmatched strategic consulting expertise, we will undoubtedly be the company best equipped to help organizations successfully navigate this new age of healthcare.
This acquisition allows Axiom EPM to almost immediately enhance the value we deliver to clients by leveraging Kaufman Hall’s expertise in strategic management consulting and best practices for financial planning and analysis for healthcare organizations. Kaufman Hall’s strong brand, expertise and senior relationships with CFOs and board members presents an exciting growth opportunity for Axiom EPM and our customers will certainly benefit from expanded financial resources, increased R&D investments in the technology platform, and expanded support and technical resources.
I am honored to lead the Axiom EPM subsidiary moving forward. We look forward to working together with Kaufman Hall to continue to create value to our customers.”
Zynx Health acquires CareInSync
Siva Subramanian, PhD, Senior Vice President Mobile Products, Zynx Health
“As numerous policies continue to unfold in healthcare, providers increasingly are reimbursed based on the quality of care delivered to patients, not solely on the quantity. Fortunately, the body of medical evidence, much of which supports optimal care delivery, is growing at an astonishing rate.
The challenge for healthcare organizations is to stay on top of all this emerging knowledge and to put this evidence into play in a way that will positively affect the patient experience. Providers need to bring the most current and actionable knowledge to the right place, right clinician, right patient – at the right moment in time. In addition, they need to enable all caregivers to collaborate, working in unison to optimally guide patients to the best possible outcomes.
The good news: With the acquisition of CareInSync, Zynx Health can now better empower care providers to positively influence the overall patient care journey. The CareInSync Carebook solution delivers a real-time multidisciplinary mobile care navigation network that enables multiple caregivers, from diverse locations, to seamlessly collaborate on care, creating safe transition plans, coordinating care and engaging patients post-discharge. The care coordination ability makes it possible for Zynx to not only offer the evidence and clinical care guidelines that providers need but also to provide a communications platform that enables providers to optimally leverage this intelligence.
In essence, the CareInSync Carebook solution makes it possible to create a “virtual huddle” for care team members. Consider the power of such collaboration: Instead of the typical discharge scenario, which includes some 20 to 30 provider disciplines struggling to connect and exchange information via a cascade of pages and phone calls (sometimes as many as 40-50), scattered post-it notes and ad-hoc hallway conversations, with CareInSync’s mobile solution, various members of the care team converge simultaneously and share information in real time – and ultimately the patient is discharged safely and efficiently.
The solution also helps to bring all involved parties to the proverbial table at the precise, when-needed moment. For example, when an 82 year old patient recently showed up at a hospital emergency department, the nurse care manager virtually connected with the patient’s case manager and discovered that the patient had a DNR in place. As such, the clinicians were able to accommodate the patient’s wishes – potentially saving some anguish for the family as well as unnecessary and costly care for the hospital.
With Carebook as part of the Zynx portfolio, we can provide the innovation – both in approach and technology – that care providers need to have a positive impact on the healthcare journey. Now, Zynx is fully prepared to provide not only knowledge but the platform that brings this evidence to fruition at the most crucial moments of each and every patient’s care journey. The end result will be reduced readmissions, improved quality and enhanced patient satisfaction.
In short, we not only provide the most sophisticated playbook but also empower all of the various team members to take the actions that win the game.”
Bertina Yen, MD, MPH, Executive Vice President, Product Group, Zynx Health
“As the nation moves toward value-based care models that take a longitudinal view of the overall patient care experience, leaders are realizing that care doesn’t start and stop in a medical clinic, hospital, or nursing home. Rather, health and wellness is a life-long journey. Zynx Health, like all of the Hearst Health companies, is focusing on guiding a person’s care from beginning to end, helping to write a better health and wellness story, from introduction to denouement, per se.
To accomplish this rather lofty goal, Zynx offers innovative, knowledge-based, outcomes-driven clinical improvement solutions that address the evolving needs of our healthcare provider client base.
And, we acknowledge that with the shift toward shared savings and ACO payment models, our clients’ care guidance needs have begun to extend not only beyond the four walls of the hospital but also beyond the reach of traditional EHR workflow and functionality. In order to achieve our vision of “Perfect Care for All” and our mission to help our clients measurably improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of care, we recognize that our solution portfolio must address additional care settings such as long-term post-acute care, as well as support care providers who may be on different or non-existent EHR platforms.
The acquisition of CareInSync will enable Zynx to have a decidedly positive impact on this patient journey. The CareInSync Carebook solution delivers a real-time, multidisciplinary care collaboration platform for providers. With Carebook becoming part of the Zynx portfolio of products, we can extend our reach and ability to put vital information into the hands of the care team during critical patient-centered transitions across care settings. At the same time, Zynx now has the opportunity to tap into its deep knowledge reservoir to enrich the evidence base of the Carebooksolution.
Overall, we aim to help healthcare organizations provide their caregivers with evidence-based support at those critical moments in time that make a real difference in the quality of care that a patient receives. We also realize that better communication among caregivers is critically important to the healthcare experience, while the lack of communication and coordination can result in less than optimal results. This acquisition makes so much sense in light of these revelations, as Carebook makes it possible to place knowledge into the hands of people who touch a patient’s care, while also coordinating the actions of multiple caregivers.
In addition, withits unique ability to connect and coordinate multiple members of the care team in real-time on a secured communications platform, the CareInSync Carebook solutionis a natural fit with Zynx’s product strategy – one that leverages innovative technology, proven content, and rigorous methodology. CareInSync’s ability to demonstrate an impact on a variety of client outcomes such as readmissions, length of stay, and patient satisfaction is not only remarkable but also very consistent with the clinical and financial outcomes that Zynx has been able to help our clients achieve with our other products.
The acquisition also lines up with the overall Hearst Health mission, which aims to provide vital information to everyone involved in care and to empower the communication among caregivers that can ultimately enhance the overall patient experience. We are very excited to welcome CareInSync into the Zynx product portfolio and the extended Hearst family. We look forward to introducing theirsolutions to current and future Zynx clients.”
