MUMBAI: Inventurus Knowledge Solutions (IKS Health) aims to be the leader in the US rural healthcare outsourcing market after its acquisition of TruBridge on Thursday, its top executive said.
“IKS is in the business of taking away or outsourcing chore tasks from healthcare providers in the US, so that they could focus on their core of taking care of patients…when you look at rural healthcare and RCM (revenue cycle management) within rural healthcare, TrueBridge is the largest player by far,” IKS Health founder and global chief executive officer (CEO) Sachin Gupta told Mint in an interview. “In the rural healthcare market segment, once we combine effectively with TrueBridge, we will be the undisputed leader,” he added.
A healthcare outsourcer, like IKS, handles the administrative, clinical and operational tasks, including billing, clinical documentation, and insurance claims processing.
On Thursday, IKS Health announced the acquisition of US-based TruBridge Inc, a Nasdaq-listed provider of healthcare technology solutions for rural and community hospitals, for up to $565 million. The deal, which puts TruBridge at an enterprise value of $557 million, expands the market presence for IKS and also allows it to access a large amount of key healthcare data through TruBridge’s electronic health records (EHR).
The deal, through IKS Health’s US subsidiary, will be funded by a loan of up to $670 million secured for a five-year term from a consortium led by Citibank, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase. The deal is expected to be net profit- and earnings per share (EPS)-accretive in FY27, the company said in an investor presentation on Thursday.
This is IKS Health’s biggest acquisition, and follows its 2023 purchase of AQuity Solutions in a $200 million deal. IKS Health is a leader in the large physician group market in the US. With its latest acquisition, it is foraying into the rural market with small and mid-sized hospitals.
Scaling in the rural market
“The rural market in the US is about 20% of US's population, so give or take about 60 million people, and it's a highly underserved market because access to care in the rural settings is very sparse,” said Gupta, adding that the market is also reimbursed predominantly through medicare and medicaid, which are some of the lowest reimbursement rates among insurers in the US.
“As a result, we thought that the importance of our care enablement platform, that brings a different level of financial viability to healthcare providers - that platform would be very relevant to the rural healthcare setting,” he said.
IKS offers a range of artificial intelligence-powered services to hospitals and clinic groups—from scheduling patient visits more efficiently to managing billing and maximizing revenue collections.
The company aims to leverage TruBridge’s electronic health records to build and drive agentic AI orchestrations in real-time. “TrueBridge has built a very dominant electronic health record that is prevalent across 30% of all the rural hospitals in the US,” said Gupta. Out of about 2,200 rural hospitals in the US, TruBridge has electronic health records deployed in about 700.
The goal is to implement IKS Health’s suite of actions across all hospital customers, as well as to scale up. “TrueBridge is very strong currently in the 0-50 bed hospital segment, but there's another segment with about 1,500 hospitals that are in the 50 to 200 bed hospital segment…the idea would be to take the right combination of [their] system of record and our system of action upstream to that segment,” said Gupta, adding that the company plans to grow faster than the market in both the large physician group market and the rural healthcare market.