May 25, 2021 (Boston, MA) – Covington Associates, a leading middle market investment bank announced its role as exclusive financial advisor to Artifact Health, a physician engagement platform, in its merger with Iodine Software. The acquisition brings together two industry leaders and expands Iodine’s clinical predictions and insights platform beyond clinical documentation improvement (CDI) teams to directly engage physicians through Artifact’s HIPAA-compliant mobile platform.
Iodine experienced rapid growth over the last decade by applying its CognitiveML Engine to solve mid-revenue cycle leakage — a problem that costs healthcare systems billions in lost revenue due to resource-intensive, highly manual clinical documentation workflows. More than 500 hospitals and health systems using Iodine report significant improvements to quality scores and increase earned-revenue capture. Today’s acquisition announcement signals Iodine’s commitment to expand its machine-learning technology to broader healthcare workflows.
Artifact Health is a pioneer of physician-centric CDI and coding workflow solutions. In 2016, Artifact collaborated with Johns Hopkins Medicine to help develop a cloud-based mobile platform that makes it faster and easier for healthcare providers to respond securely and compliantly to questions about patient documentation. Artifact seamlessly integrates with core healthcare systems, including all major electronic health record systems, to ease administrative burdens on healthcare providers and give them back valuable time for patient care. Artifact’s mobile platform is currently deployed to more than 80,000 healthcare providers at more than 200 hospitals.
“Artifact allows us to immediately improve the documentation experience for physicians,” said William Chan, CEO and co-founder of Iodine Software. “The acquisition also allows us to realize our vision of delivering a broader set of our machine-learning predictions directly to physicians.”
Iodine selected Artifact for its flexible technology, mobile delivery and seamless EHR workflow integration, which produce demonstrably better physician satisfaction and engagement. By adding Artifact’s mobile-based platform to Iodine, healthcare organizations can now automate physician queries and other administrative tasks that require more complex clinical judgment while delivering them directly to physicians’ mobile devices. Together, Iodine and Artifact deliver a powerful mid-revenue cycle solution that improves documentation integrity and ensures proper reimbursement so healthcare systems maintain long-term financial resiliency.
“Over the past seven years, Artifact Health has built a solid reputation for streamlining and standardizing the physician query process with efficient, convenient and easy-to-use technology that physicians find enjoyable to use,” said Marisa MacClary, CEO and co-founder of Artifact Health. “Iodine and Artifact share the same mission to design innovative healthcare technologies that improve patient care by reducing administrative burden. We are thrilled to join an outstanding company with superior technology and an amazing team.”
The full Artifact team will join Iodine immediately. Moving forward, the combined Iodine-Artifact team will continue delivering innovative machine-learning predictions that engage caregivers at their convenience. Ultimately, the combined companies will help healthcare organizations achieve their desired financial, operational, and quality outcomes.
Artifact CEO Marisa MacClary will join Iodine as Executive Vice President, Artifact, and will lead the Artifact platform.
Covington Associates is an investment banking firm offering advisory services in the areas of mergers and acquisitions (“M&A”), capital raising and strategic advisory to middle-market companies across the Healthcare, Business Services, Consumer & Industrial, and Technology verticals. Founded in 1991 and based in Boston, the vision for Covington has been to provide clients with the highest caliber of senior-level attention and to remain an advice driven and results focused organization. Since its inception, Covington Associates has completed over 350 transactions globally for both private and publicly traded companies totaling over $20 billion. Further information can be found at http://www.covingtonassociates.com/overview/.
Artifact Health provides the first mobile platform that streamlines the physician query process so hospitals can improve the quality of patient records and ensure full reimbursement for services. Already in use by thousands of physicians, Artifact simplifies a traditionally time-consuming, multi-step process, allowing physicians to respond to queries anytime, anywhere in seconds. By shortening average physician response time to queries by 20x, Artifact helps CDI specialists and coders receive more accurate responses faster, which can translate into millions of dollars in revenue for hospitals. Visit www.artifacthealth.com to learn more.
Iodine Software is a healthcare AI company that has pioneered a new machine learning approach — Cognitive Emulation — to help healthcare finance leaders build resilient organizations. Founded in 2010, Iodine’s technology unifies clinical concepts, evidence-based medicine, and deep machine learning to power revenue cycle solutions that maximize revenue capture and data accuracy. To date, the Iodine AwareCDI™ Suite has helped more than 500 hospitals recognize $1.5 billion in additional appropriate reimbursement annually. To learn more, visit iodinesoftware.com.