NantHealth on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Boston-based NaviNet, wrapping up what it called a 10-year plan for the tech firm, CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, said.

Under terms of the deal, NantWorks, a holding company, and its majority-owned subsidiary NantHealth, are buying NaviNet for an undisclosed sum. The deal gives NantHealth entry into the payer market and strengthens its personalized medicine goals. NaviNet is known for its payer-provider collaboration technology.

NantVentures, the private equity arm of NantWorks participated in the financing.

“The acquisition of NaviNet completes our 10-year vision at NantWorks and NantHealth to integrate and coordinate our complex healthcare ecosystem from the knowledge domain, to the care delivery domain and now to the payer domain, as a single sign-on, seamless, cloud-based, secure adaptive learning system for patients, payers, and providers,” Soon-Shiong, founder and CEO of NantHealth, said in statement.

The billionaire entrepreneur is quoted in the Los Angeles Business Journal as saying a public offering for NantHealth, which had been planned for last year, had been delayed pending the acquisition and integration of NaviNet.

The acquisition continues NantHealth’s vision of delivering on whole health systems integration and revolutionizing the patient-clinician experience by bringing real-time molecular and evidence-based insights to the point of care, he said.

NaviNet has a customer base of more than 40 health plans and nationwide network of more than 450,000 users. Its All-Payer Access provider portal connects more than 450 commercial and government plans via NaviNet Open, its payer-provider collaboration platform.

“This cloud-based system allows provider access to over 90 percent of covered lives in the United States and will serve as a transformative platform for the communication of cutting-edge knowledge to all,” said Soon-Shiong.

“By combining NaviNet Open’s applications – eligibility and benefits from more than 450 commercial and government plans, referrals, authorizations, document exchange, claims management, and more – with NantHealth’s interoperability, decision support and connectivity platforms and with NantOmics supercomputer predictive modeling platforms, we are now poised to be the nation's leading healthcare collaboration network by transforming the payer-provider relationship to evolve from transactions to interactions and finally to collaboration,” he added

NantHealth will be able to leverage NaviNet’s nationwide network across more than 170,000 active provider offices and 2,000 hospital settings to reach more doctors with genomics, decision support and connectivity solutions to enable better care coordination at lower costs for patients.

“Our dream was to address the cognitive overload that faces clinicians today especially in the complexity of cancer, and support community oncologists as well as major academic centers,” he said. “Finally, we have the infrastructure in place to make this a reality.”

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