Dive Brief:
New Mountain Capital is combining three of its portfolio companies to create an artificial intelligence-backed revenue cycle management firm called Smarter Technologies, the private equity firm said Monday.
The deal merges three companies that received investments from New Mountain this year: Access Healthcare, a revenue cycle management platform; SmarterDx, which uses AI to analyze charts to catch missed billing codes and appeal denied claims; and Thoughtful.ai, a company that uses AI agents to handle tasks like checking insurance eligibility, managing prior authorizations and processing claims.
Jeremy Delinsky, former chief technology officer at health IT firm Athenahealth and an executive advisor to New Mountain, will serve as CEO of the combined company.
Dive Insight:
Smarter Technologies will serve more than 200 clients, including more than 60 hospitals and health systems, according to a press release. The combined firm is expected to generate more than $800 million in revenue.
Individual leaders across each of the three companies will continue to oversee their business units, New Mountain said.
The deal aims to offer a “comprehensive” platform for making health systems’ administrative work for managing revenue and billing more efficient, the private equity firm said. AI has become an alluring technology across the healthcare sector, igniting hopes it could alleviate some of the industry’s administrative and back-office tasks.
“We recognize that healthcare provider organizations are confronted with growing administrative and operational challenges, and they need a new kind of flexible revenue management platform that brings together the most proven AI technologies with the lowest cost to serve, highest quality global operations platform at scale,” Delinsky said in a statement.
The latest rollup by New Mountain comes months after the private equity firm merged some of its other healthcare investments into a new payment accuracy company.
In September, the private equity firm said it was combining The Rawlings Group, an analytics firm that finds third parties responsible for paying medical claims, the payment integrity platform of health tech provider Apixio and overpayment identification firm Varis.
Then, early this year, New Mountain acquired AI-backed healthcare payments company Machinify to add to the combined firm, which took on the Machinify brand.
Healthcare technology has also recently become an increased focus for private equity investors. The value of private equity and venture capital deals in health tech has grown about 50% year over year in 2024, according to a report published last month by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
