HIMSS Analytics sells vendor data business to Definitive Healthcare

HIMSS Analytics has sold its vendor data business to Definitive Healthcare, a private healthcare data firm.

The sale will allow HIMSS Analytics to focus on growing its maturity model portfolio, HIMSS Analytics CEO Blain Newton said. The company, a subsidiary of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, offers maturity models that guide providers when implementing new technology. These include the widely used EMR Adoption Model.

"We see our maturity model portfolio as an opportunity globally to create some meaningful impact in an accelerated way," Newton said. "Because of this transaction, it'll lead to clinical improvements."

HIMSS does not plan to divest any other businesses, according to Newton.

HIMSS had revenue of $85.8 million in 2015, the most recent year for which data were available, down from $87.8 million in 2014. The company held $72.7 million in assets as of 2015.

In March 2018, HIMSS acquired Healthbox, a consulting and management firm that used to run a healthcare business accelerator. HIMSS purchased the company to tap its consulting and fund management capabilities, which it will use to advise hospitals in their investments.

Definitive Healthcare will now incorporate HIMSS Analytics functionality and vendor data into its own assets. HIMSS Analytics data come from the company's Logic, Predict, and Analyze products, as well as custom research products.

The resulting combined data set will include information about executed IT-purchasing contracts and proposals. Already, Definitive Healthcare has data on 8,800 hospitals and integrated delivery networks, 150,000 physician groups, 1 million physicians and others in the industry. The company, which is backed by Spectrum Equity, sells the data to anyone interested in the healthcare provider market, from staffing firms to life sciences companies.

"The acquisition fits really well into our plan, which is to continue to innovate and develop new data products," Definitive Healthcare CEO Jason Krantz said. "Adding some of the proprietary HIMSS data will allow us to further create complementary products."

The acquisition comes just a month before the HIMSS conference, which runs Feb. 11-15 in Orlando, Fla. In 2018, more than 43,000 people attended the conference, during which data-sharing was front and center, with CMS Administrator Seema Verma announcing the CMS' MyHealthEData initiative and Alphabet announcing the Google Cloud Healthcare application programming interface.