Startups

Baltimore’s Audacious Inquiry is set to be acquired by PointClickCare

Ai President Scott Afzal said the move is an opportunity to scale the impact of the healthtech company.

Audacious Inquiry's team in 2020. (Courtesy photo)

Baltimore health IT company Audacious Inquiry (Ai) is set to be acquired by Canadian healthcare technology company PointClickCare Technologies.

Ai’s work is all about the data transfer and communication of medical records to coordinate care after an initial hospital visit. PointClickCare, for its part, is the core technology system behind skilled nursing facilities and long-term care facilities. Ai’s technology is the missing link for PointClickCare in transitioning senior patients to the next point of care with the most context possible about what a patient needs, Ai President Scott Afzal told Technical.ly.

For Afzal, the acquisition is an opportunity to scale the impact of the company with the infrastructure and size of PointClickCare.

“There’s a really core level of collaboration that we can enable by what we’re doing” at Ai, Afzal said. And because PointClickCare, based in Ontario, “is meaningfully larger than us, we can take what we do today across many states of the country and do that far more broadly. That allows us to increase our impact in really meaningful ways.”

Scott Afzal. (Photo via LinkedIn)

All 170 Ai employees will become a part of PointClickCare in the prospective acquisition. The company will remain at its offices just off UMBC’s campus and continue to operate as the brand Audacious Inquiry under PointClickCare. Both companies value the DMV metro area for its proximity to the center for Medicaid and Medicare offices along with the access to talent familiar with the healthcare domain, Afzal said.

The companies didn’t disclose the financial details of the acquisition.

As Technical.ly reported in April 2020, Ai’s work during the early days of the pandemic, using restful APIs to enable real-time data sharing, was instrumental in getting the data needed in Maryland to manage the spread of COVID-19. The company’s work and experience coordinating care with SaaS tools across networks and responding to emergencies and disasters is another point that made Ai attractive to PointClickCare.

“This acquisition will enable PointClickCare to expand the reach of our solutions by adding Audacious Inquiry’s strong products and network of relationships as the shift to value-based care fuels the growing market demand for intelligence and collaboration tools,” PointClickCare CEO Dave Wessinger said in a statement.

“We’ve always held two things out as our guiding principles as a company,” Afzal said. “Do right by our team and do right by our partners. If we do those two things we’ll be successful and we’ll grow. And we’ll have an opportunity to be impactful in the world. And PointClickCare has those same principles.”

P.S. If you’re a founder asking, “When is the right time to sell my company?” know that the answer might be, never. Here’s some advice on making the call.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
Correction: PointClickCare is based in Ontario, not Ottawa. (2/2/22, 9:55 a.m.)

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