MultiPlan Acquires Discovery Health Partners For $155 Million

MultiPlan, a provider of healthcare cost management solutions, acquired Discovery Health Partners, a provider of cloud-based healthcare revenue and payment integrity solutions, for $155 million.

About 80 healthcare payor customers use Discovery Solutions in the Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial markets to improve their payment and revenue processes’ integrity. With this acquisition, MultiPlan now serves more than 700 healthcare payors in the commercial health, government, property and casualty, and dental markets.

According to MultiPlan, Discovery’s solutions will complement and extend its payment integrity offerings, spanning the claims life cycle to ensure the legitimacy of a payor’s payment requests as well as its premium collections. Together, the companies will offer a suite of solutions that analyze and impact the right eligibility and claims at the right time to be paid the first time correctly.

“Waste in the U.S. healthcare system accounts for about a quarter of total healthcare spending and presents a tremendous opportunity to deliver affordability, fairness, and efficiency to the industry,” said Mark Tabak, MultiPlan Chairman, and CEO.

“This acquisition of Discovery will extend the reach of our program integrity solutions not only across the claim value chain but also across multiple payor lines of business. We look forward to joining forces with Discovery to deepen our value to healthcare payers and the healthcare industry as a whole.”

BofA Securities served as a financial advisor, and Kirkland & Ellis served as legal counsel to MultiPlan for this transaction. TripleTree acted as the exclusive financial advisor, and Goodwin Procter served as legal counsel to Discovery.

A total of 184 digital health companies were acquired in 2020, compared to 169 in 2019, a 9% increase in M&A activity in year-over-year, according to Mercom’s Q4 and 2020 Digital Health Funding and M&A Report. More recently, Sphere, a healthcare payments and security software provider, acquired Health iPASS, a healthcare revenue cycle management platform that simplifies the check-in process and payment workflow before and at time-of-service.