• Accordis Inc, a provider of business office services for hospitals & emergency transport agencies merged with Zavata.
• Apollo Health Street acquired Armanti Financial Services, a US based company offering hospital billing and receivables management services for $31 million.
• Zavata acquired the RCMS line of Siemens Medical Health Services

The large Indian revenue cycle management (RCM) service providers are looking at acquiring mid-sized billing companies in the US primarily to acquire the marketing front-end as well as add to their clientele. Apollo Health Street, a leading player in the RCM space followed a similar approach, and recently acquired a medical billing company in the US to complement its capabilities.

Vendors in the space

The services offered by RCM vendors range from eligibility verification to A/R follow up. This includes taking care of the various transactions starting right from the time a patient is admitted in a hospital to discharge of the patient from the hospital. Some of the prominent players in the space are listed in the table below:

Moving from merely offering specific and discrete services such as medical billing, collections, vendors such as Zavata, Perot Systems and Apollo Health Street are now positioning themselves as end-to-end providers.

Going forward…

While the Indian vendors will actively seek marketing front end in the US, RCM services companies in the US will look for offshore presence. Some of the large RCM companies in the US including Per-Se Technologies, Athena Health, have not yet explored offshoring. While the strong relationships with hospitals give them continuous work, they heavily rely on the freelance manpower pool within the US. We believe that all large medical billing companies will need to have an offshore presence to remain competitive. Going forward, overseas acquisitions by Indian vendors will continue and US players will in turn look to acquire Indian companies.