Varian has acquired Evinance Innovation Inc., a clinical decision support software company, as part of a plan to integrate its Evinance Decision Support platform with the Varian 360 Oncology care management platform.

The addition of the privately-held, Montreal-based enterprise’s solution is expected to enhance clinical workflow and decision support for physicians and patients, along with adherence tracking based on National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) and other evidence-based guidelines.

“Once you have these guidelines, you would be able to look at the flow in a visual manner and then be able to see if a particular patient, a particular doctor or a particular hospital is compliant, or not compliant with the pathways and guidelines that have been published,” Rachan Rao, director of the Oncology Care Management Group at Varian, told HCB News. “360 Oncology is an oncology care management platform where the goal is to help the hospitals and help physicians navigate the patient journey, through their cancer journey if you will. During that time, it’s very important to know, for example, in a tumor board, the decisions that need to be made so the Evinance acquisition and NCCN guidelines help there.”

The integration of both solutions is expected to create a platform that can equip physicians and patients with such guidelines and visual care pathways for documenting patient progress as tools that enable the most informed decision-making at the point of care.

The plan is part of Varian’s plan for helping providers meet the requirements of value-based health care, and aligns with a series of other acquisitions the California-based company has made in the new year.

These include its purchase of Mobius Medical Systems for access to Mobius QA, Mobius 3D and DoseLab packages; and its agreement to acquire Australia-based Sirtex Medical Limited, in a move that would enable Varian to enter the interventional oncology market.

Rao says the acquisition of Evinance stands to benefit not just the workflow and care carried out by physicians and providers, but the satisfaction of the patient experience too.

“It will definitely help those customers as well, because they don’t necessarily have a 360 platform, so we would eventually be able to incorporate 360 in to their system as well. So they could benefit from the features and functionalities of 360 which, at a high level, are helping to promote physician support," he said. "From a care coordination standpoint and patient engagement standpoint, all of them really put together, the benefits really are an improved patient outcome, lowered cost and improved quality.”

Employees of Evinance will not be impacted by the acquisition.

Financial details were not disclosed at this time.

Rad Oncology Homepage