PE-Backed Appriss Acquires Skilled Nursing Software Firm PatientPing for a Reported $500M [UPDATED]

PatientPing, a software company that has garnered significant venture capital funding as it looks to ease care transitions between nursing homes and other settings, has sold to Appriss Health, the companies announced Tuesday.

PE Hub initially reported the news Monday, citing “people familiar with the transaction”; the two firms formally confirmed that they had reached a definitive agreement on Tuesday morning.

The news outlet placed a $500 million price tag on PatientPing, though the companies did not formally disclose the terms of the transaction.

The Louisville, Ky.-based Appriss — with backing from private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners — primarily focuses on pharmacy and addiction issues, with the PatientPing pickup serving to diversify its health holdings, PE Hub observed.

“Appriss Health already provides its technology, data, and analytics to improve how care is provided in over a billion patient encounters each year,” Appriss Health president Rob Cohen said in a statement. “We are excited to be able to immediately serve this broader community of healthcare professionals with unique insights, and real-time clinical decision support.”

Founded in 2013, PatientPing had placed its software in about 4,000 post-acute care facilities nationwide as of last summer. Participating providers receive a “ping,” or an automated notification, when a patient shows up at a particular site of care — a system that the Boston-based software firm believes could solve the persistent problem of residents falling through the cracks during and after transitions along the continuum of care.

“We deliver the notifications to them so that they could coordinate with those providers that are seeing the patient in the ER, or the hospital, and just say: Hey, we’re the SNF that just recently was seeing that patient, and they’ve got these conditions, and you ought think about this for their care plan,” CEO Jay Desai told SNN last June.

At the time, PatientPing had just secured $60 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, F-Prime Capital, Google venture capital arm GV, and Transformation Capital; that injection brought the amount of money invested in PatientPing to more than $100 million.

“It’s been exciting to watch PatientPing steadily expand its geographical reach and technology capabilities to positively impact millions of patients nationwide,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Julie Yoo said in a statement announcing the Series C round. “Their platform plays such a critical role in the transition of patients between sites of care, and eliminates one of the major blind spots in our fragmented health care system by longitudinally tracking a patient’s care journey across all encounters.”

The combined Appriss-PatientPing footprint now covers 7,500 post-acute facilities, 2,500 hospitals, and 25,000 pharmacies, according to the companies.

“Our combined networks will connect providers across all care settings so they can work together better to improve clinical episodes and care transitions for the millions of patients that interact with the nations’ healthcare providers,” Desai said in a Tuesday statement.

Last summer, Desai in particular identified hospitals and other providers in the Western U.S. as a new area of growth for PatientPing, though he also expressed optimism that the COVID-era relaxation of rules around telehealth would usher in more tech innovation in post-acute and long-term care.

“In the post-acute segment, I think that there’s a really neat opportunity for telehealth to apply grease to care transitions — where right now, you have to wait for an in-person interaction to happen,” he said at the time.

The reported deal represents another recent blockbuster transaction in the world of skilled nursing tech. PointClickCare last December purchased Collective Medical, another software firm aimed at boosting collaboration among providers up and down the acuity scale, for $650 million.

“The health care ecosystem is a mix of disconnected providers, systems, plans, processes, and data,” PointClickCare CEO Mike Wessinger said at the time. “Health care costs and risk are on the rise, while patient care and provider-to-provider coordination are inconsistent.”