Change Healthcare has acquired National Decision Support Company (NDSC), a provider of cloud-based solutions that enable delivery of medical guidelines through electronic health record systems to the point of care.

The purchase of the Wisconsin-based company enables Change Healthcare to utilize clinically-based knowledge and next-generation technologies to reduce costs, ensure better patient outcomes and create an interconnected and interoperable health care environment.

“Adding its cloud-based solution to our decision support portfolio enables us to put clinical intelligence in the hands of physicians and other clinicians at the point of care through integrations with leading electronic health record (EHR) systems,” Jackie Mitus M.D., GM, SVP, decision support for Change Healthcare, told HCB News. “We believe that with ready access to medical guidelines in their workflow, clinicians can make decisions that lead to better patient outcomes, improve efficiency and reduce inappropriate care that leads to overuse and unnecessary costs in health care.”

The acquisition follows a year and a half-long initiative called InterQual AutoReviewT in which the Change Healthcare’s InterQual team utilized NDSC’s CareSelectT technology to deliver the team’s clinical criteria to the point of care.

Delivery of such guidelines is provided by CareSelectT Imaging, NDSC’s flagship product, through an exclusive digital distribution license with the American College of Radiology. It also enables clinicians to meet the federal mandate of consulting Appropriate Use Criteria (AUC) for imaging.

The addition of NDSC provides Change Healthcare customers with access to other products, including the CareSelect Choosing Wisely and the CareSelect Lab solutions, with the goal of the acquisition being to streamline utilization management and authorization processes, and reduce laborious and redundant tasks as well as expenses.

“As we achieve our mission to bring evidence-based content to the point of care and leverage clinical data to improve quality of care and control costs, we will enable our customers to influence clinician ordering, reduce administrative burden, and streamline data exchange,” Mitus said.

Change Healthcare has recently embarked on a series of partnerships to enhance guidelines for patient care.

At RSNA in November, for instance, the company announced its intention to team up with Google Cloud to create an imaging platform to enable physicians of different medical backgrounds to discuss cases remotely in real time. It also agreed to leverage its AI strategy with Zebra Medical Vision to provide AI solutions to assist complex radiology reporting workflows.

All NDSC employees will maintain their current positions and responsibilities during the integration process with the company continuing to operate out of its Madison, Wisconsin headquarters.

Financial details were not disclosed.

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