Healthline Networks, the healthcare media, information and technology company, is breaking off one of its offerings into a separate, wholly owned subsidiary.
The San Francisco-based company has created Talix, which will offer a platform for providers and insurers to calculate the risk scores of patient populations managed under risk-based contracts.
Talix's core product, called Coding Insight, helps determine a patient's risk-adjustment factor score—the metric the CMS uses to calculate payments for a group of people under a capitated payment contract such as Medicare Advantage.
Unlike current scoring systems, it is designed to be fully automated by scanning patients' electronic health records and recommending the billing codes that will be used as part of the risk score calculation.
Healthline Networks launched Talix this week at the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
Healthline, best known for its consumer information platform which competes in the same space as WebMD, is a very different company from Talix, said Derek Gordon, Talix's general manager. Valuation multiples for a media company can be much lower than for a health information technology company, and the separation allows the two divisions to pursue their own capital-raising and exit strategies, whether that's a sale, initial public offering or something else.
