envoy - done deal:
Tuesday May 30, 7:30 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Healtheon/WebMD Corp.
Healtheon/WebMD Completes Acquisition of Quintiles' Envoy Unit
Healtheon/WebMD Enhances Network With Greater Payor, Provider and Patient Connectivity Through Envoy Relationships
Quintiles and Healtheon/WebMD to Accelerate Co-Development of Integrated Suite Of Web-Enabled Products to Improve Drug Development and Commercialization
ATLANTA and RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., May 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Healtheon/WebMD Corporation (Nasdaq: HLTH - news) and Quintiles Transnational Corp. (Nasdaq: QTRN - news) today announced completion of Healtheon/WebMD's acquisition of Quintiles' electronic data interchange unit, ENVOY Corporation, under the financial terms originally announced on Jan. 24, 2000.
In 1999, ENVOY's network processed more than 1.4 billion medical, pharmacy and dental transactions involving about 250,000 physicians, 35,000 pharmacies, 47,000 dentists, 4,500 hospitals and 900 payors. With the acquisition of ENVOY, Healtheon/WebMD will process more than 2 billion transactions a year for U.S. healthcare customers.
As announced on Jan. 24, 2000, Healtheon/WebMD acquired ENVOY from Quintiles in exchange for 35 million shares of Healtheon/WebMD stock and $400 million in cash. Quintiles has issued Healtheon/WebMD a warrant to purchase up to 10 million shares of Quintiles common stock at $40 per share, exercisable for four years. The acquisition was treated as a purchase transaction for accounting purposes.
Also as part of the agreement, Quintiles and Healtheon/WebMD are jointly developing an integrated series of Web-based products to vastly improve the efficiency of drug development and commercialization; and Quintiles is Healtheon/WebMD's exclusive licensee for creating healthcare informatics products.
Immediately upon the closing of the acquisition, Healtheon/WebMD and ENVOY are executing the integration of payors with connectivity to ENVOY into Healtheon/WebMD's professional portal, WebMD Practice(SM). The next generation of WebMD Practice will bring physician practice managers and other administrators improved usability and the ability to perform real-time transactions with a significantly expanded group of insurers.
Planned integration initiatives also include the consolidation of Healtheon/WebMD's existing EDI operations into ENVOY, which will be led by ENVOY Chief Executive Officer Jim Kever, and Fred C. Goad, chairman of ENVOY.
``The completion of our acquisition of ENVOY significantly enhances our network with greater payor connectivity, accelerating our goal of using the Internet to provide better access to information for all participants in the healthcare industry including doctors, consumers and healthcare institutions,'' said Jeff Arnold, chief executive officer of Healtheon/WebMD. ``We will immediately execute the plan for the complete integration of ENVOY, which we began preparing in February. We're pleased that the senior management team of ENVOY is remaining with the company to run the ENVOY operations from Nashville, where the company is based.''
Dennis Gillings, chairman and chief executive officer of Quintiles Transnational, said: ``I believe completion of this deal marks the beginning of a new era of vastly improved healthcare transaction and information delivery to all stakeholders in the system -- patients, doctors, payors and pharmaceutical companies. Teams from Quintiles and Healtheon/WebMD have been working since February to plan a new Web-based system to improve the efficiency of drug development and bring new medicines to patients sooner. With the closing of this deal, those efforts will now dramatically accelerate.''
Gillings will be appointed to the Healtheon/WebMD Board of Directors in the near future. |
