UnitedHealth Group will acquire MedSynergies Inc., a closely held firm that works with doctor groups affiliated with hospital systems, a move to deepen the company’s role in the growing trend toward integrated health care providers.
UnitedHealth’s Optum health services arm didn’t disclose terms of the deal, which it said it expected to close in the next two to four weeks. MedSynergies, based in Irving, Texas, focuses on helping to manage doctor practices, including financial functions such as billing, reimbursement and collections.
MedSynergies’ fastest-growing client base is among health systems that are buying or cooperating with doctor groups, said J.R. Thomas, its chief executive.
These tie-ups are becoming increasingly common, for reasons including doctors’ feeling squeezed in clinical practice and hospitals’ efforts to build market clout and move toward new methods of reimbursement that are supposed to reward coordination of patients’ care.
One major challenge for doctors is to manage the complexity of different contracts from health insurers, each of which may tie reimbursement incentives to different efficiency and care-quality targets. “There’s a lot of competition going on right now over who will help the hospitals manage risk more effectively,” as they form big integrated systems, said Paul Mango, a director at McKinsey & Co., a management consulting firm, which wasn’t involved in the MedSynergies deal.
Optum, for its part, already does extensive business with hospital systems, but much of its focus has been on acute care in the hospital setting, not in the physicians’ offices, said Bill Miller, chief executive of OptumInsight, an operating unit of Optum. Optum has also been aggressively expanding its own physician-group operations. “This is a great strategic fit for us,” Miller said.
Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group is also the parent of the biggest U.S. insurer, UnitedHealthcare.
