On a Growth Trajectory: Uniphy, Acquired by Virginia-Based Harris Healthcare, is Staying in Newark
Newark-based Uniphy Health Systems has been acquired by Harris Healthcare (Herndon, Va.). Uniphy Health, which is located at NJIT’s Enterprise Development Center (recently renamed “VentureLink”), currently has about 20 employees and plans to stay in Newark. The financial details of the deal were not discussed.
With the Uniphy Health Clinical Communications Platform, Harris Healthcare can now offer its clients new ways to improve care coordination and physician and patient engagement, Harris Healthcare said in a press release.
“Uniphy Health’s highly adopted mobile and desktop apps reach over 90,000 clinicians at leading healthcare providers such as Hackensack Meridian Health, UNC Health Care, Catholic Health Services of Long Island and BayCare. The solutions have been deployed across hundreds of healthcare facilities and are EHR agnostic.”
“What’s differentiated Uniphy is the ability to customize and configure our tools to meet a much broader set of needs of clinicians, like connecting to physicians out in the community, as well as social workers, home care aides and caregivers across the entire healthcare system,” Adam Turinas, cofounder and CEO of Uniphy, told MedCityNews.
In an interview with NJTechWeekly.com, Turinas noted that “the deal closed around the 15th of April. We got to a stage where things were going well for us, and we needed to scale. We are in an active market with a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of competitors. We needed to be part of a larger organization to address that market.” Harris Healthcare is providing Uniphy with the “muscle” to continue its growth, he said.
Uniphy had been looking for a suitor, Turinas said. “It was an executive decision by our board of directors” to confidentially approach prospective buyers, he told us. Harris acquires companies to strategically build out their portfolios of healthcare companies. They didn’t have anything in this particular space, he said.
“We plug in very nicely with them. We’ve realigned our team to fit in with their clinical group. They are really good people,” and Uniphy is already seeing a lot of synergies, Turinas said.
Uniphy was no stranger to Harris Healthcare, he added. “We actually had Hunterdon hospital as a common client, and we integrated our app with the EHR [electronic health record system] at Hunterdon. It really helps them because it delivers many different types of data to the physicians.”
Turinas further noted that the two companies are integrating, learning about each other, and that Uniphy is teaching Harris Healthcare employees about what it does.
Turinas’ company started out as “Navio Health,” which offered a product called “Practice Unite.” He and Stuart Hochron, as the Navio Health cofounders, were the subject of a NJTechWeekly.com Spotlight article in 2014. In 2016, Navio Health/Practice Unite merged with Uniphy Health, a Minneapolis-based startup that was also in the healthcare communications space. At that time, Navio Health took the Uniphy name, but stayed in Newark.
