Truven Health Buys Fortel Analytics

US-based Truven Health Analytics has acquired fraud detection specialist Fortel Analytics, whose predictive solutions are designed to identify suspicious patterns in healthcare insurance claims data. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Truven was created in 2012, following Thomson Reuters' sale of its healthcare data, analytics, performance and benchmarking arm to private equity firm Veritas Capital. The company combines expert analysis with a range of solutions including research database MarketScan, healthcare payer decision tool Advantage Suite, clinical reference Micromedex, reporting suite CareDiscovery, and hospital operating trends tool ActionOI.

These solutions will be merged with Fortel's patent-pending predictive analytics, designed to scour insurance claims data sets for statistical anomalies that are consistent with patterns of fraud and abuse.

Mike Boswood (pictured), Truven Health Analytics President and CEO, comments: 'We have built an enormously successful practice helping healthcare payers identify and reclaim funds through our statistical modeling capabilities, and the next frontier is preventing the problem altogether. By leveraging Fortel's ground-breaking predictive analytics technology, we are bringing more powerful, reliable pre-payment fraud solutions to the healthcare industry.'

Earlier this month, Truven acquired performance management specialist Simpler Consulting, which helps healthcare and other organizations develop 'lean operations'.

Web sites: www.truvenhealth.com and www.fortelanalytics.com .