A Medical Device Daily

Medstat (Ann Arbor, Michigan) reported that it has purchased two strategic healthcare payer product lines, Champ and Auto-Audit, from Solucient (Evanston, Illinois). Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Medstat is a unit of Thomson, which also is the parent company of Thomson BioWorld, the publishers of Medical Device Daily, The BBI Newsletter and other med-tech newsletters.

Champ and Medstat Advantage Suite are software applications linked to data warehouses that enable healthcare payers to identify factors driving healthcare cost increases, track and forecast healthcare expenditures, monitor medical management initiatives, evaluate the performance of insurance carriers and assess the impact of proposed changes in health benefits. AudtoAudit and complementary Medstat solutions review health claims to detect discrepancies and avoid overpayments.

"Combining Medstat and Solucient capabilities for payers further strengthens Thomson solutions for these important customers in healthcare," said Robert Cullen, president and CEO of Thomson Scientific & Healthcare.

"These new capabilities, when combined with Advantage Suite and other Medstat solutions, will increase the value we deliver to all of our customers," said Larry Hagerty, president and CEO of Medstat. "For example, we now have a larger network of payer customers and larger health claims databases that will improve our benchmarking, comparative analyses and research capabilities. This, in turn, will directly and positively support the work we do with pharmaceutical companies and hospitals."

Medstat says it has pioneered the mining and analysis of healthcare claims and other information to unearth help employers, health plans, hospitals and other organizations manage healthcare costs and quality.

Solucient is an information products company serving the healthcare industry. It is the market leader in providing tools and vital insights that healthcare managers use to improve the performance of their organizations.