It what amounts to its largest acquisition to date by both revenue and company size, Fishawack Health has acquired healthcare consulting and advisory firm Avalere Health. Throughout its more than 20 years’ existence, Avalere has partnered with leading life sciences companies, health plans, providers, and investors to bring innovative, data-driven solutions to complex healthcare challenges.
The addition of Avalere’s more than 200 advisors deepens FH’s U.S. market presence and adds more expertise to its network in the areas of policy, access, value, and evidence. In March 2022, FH acquired health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) consultancy Policy Analysis Inc. (PAI). And in early 2021, FH added PRMA Consulting, a global market access and HEOR consultancy with offices across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., to its network.
“We have a strong interest in growing our consulting, market access, value, and evidence capabilities in areas such as HEOR,” Jon Koch, CEO at FH, told PM360. “But when you think about policy, access, value, and evidence, those are pretty broad areas with a lot of subdisciplines. So from a service perspective, we view these offerings as highly complementary with very little overlap. Now, we will greatly benefit by what Avalere brings, which is a 360-degree view of the U.S. healthcare ecosystem, and that’s fueled by their expertise in life sciences, payers, providers, government, and patient experiences.”
Avalere’s focus on the U.S. market will help expand FH’s services in the space as the bulk of the company’s existing value, evidence, and access capabilities were more weighted toward Europe, according to Koch.
“Now we’re able to offer a very strategic service geographically in the U.S. and Europe, but also well beyond that,” Koch said. “We also have locations in Asia Pacific and with that we can bring a more global perspective to U.S. customers, while offering a U.S. lens to some of our international customers.”
FH and its principal investor, Bridgepoint, acquired Avalere from Inovalon, a leading provider of cloud-based platforms that empower data-driven healthcare. As part of the deal, Avalere will maintain access to Inovalon’s data resources, including the MORE2 Registry and 100% sample of Medicare Fee-for-Service (FFS) data set. The MORE2 Registry is comprised of data on more than one million physicians, almost 600,000 clinical facilities, 348 million unique patients, and 68 billion medical events. Meanwhile, Avalere’s Health Economics and Advanced Analytics practice will remain within Inovalon as the Data Solutions segment of Inovalon Insights Business Unit and continue to focus on analytics leveraging Inovalon’s proprietary data assets.
“As part of the acquisition, Avalere is bringing at least 30 data analysts with us who are really knowledgeable about the data resources we will maintain access to,” Elizabeth Carpenter, President at Avalere, told PM360. “We are interested in combining our capabilities with evidence generation capabilities that already exists at Fishawack to offer a differentiated service to the market. Today, you need to be thinking about a market access strategy when you’re generating evidence. Your value story needs to take into account what’s going on in the policy environment. And for those reasons, we’re excited to continue to serve customers in the HEOR space and feel like we’re going have a lot of good services to offer.”
Avalere will maintain its leadership structure, which in addition to Carpenter includes Kelly Brantley, Policy Practice Director; Sarah Alwardt, Healthcare Transformation Practice Director; Lance Grady, Market Access Practice Director; Miryam Frieder, Policy Practice Director; and Rob Carter, Financial Services Practice Director.
“We told our clients that everyone they know and love at Avalere would be making the transition,” Carpenter told PM360. “Overall, this represents an exciting opportunity for us to be part of an organization that’s structured to support the types of services that we offer to customers.”
