Intelligent Medical Objects sold in a $1.5 billion deal

Intelligent Medical Objects, a Rosemont, IL-based medical data company, has sold a majority stake to Boston-based private-equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners in a deal worth more than $1.5 billion.

The deal, announced today, will help Intelligent Medical Objects continue to grow as more hospitals and health providers turn to software to help them do their jobs, the companies say.

Intelligent Medical makes a software that integrates with more than 90% of acute and ambulatory electronic health records. The software, says the company, allows clinicians to more accurately specify a patient’s condition at the point of care, while also standardizing notes into data points that can be used for analytic insights. Using the software, Intelligent Medical says clinicians can avoid vaguely summarizing a patient’s condition and care.

“We help them document in their own language,” says CEO Ann Barnes. “We allow the doctor to document everything they want to capture about the patient the way that they would say it and speak it.”

Intelligent Medical Objects says its software is used by more than 740,000 physicians daily. Besides making it easier to share patient information among clinicians, the company says its software also helps to reduce clinician burnout and unnecessary care, and ensure billing and reimbursements are accurate.

This isn’t the first time a private-equity firm has invested in Intelligent Medical. In 2016, Warburg Pincus, a growth investor based in New York, purchased a majority stake in the firm directly from founder Frank Naeymi-Rad. Barnes wouldn’t disclose the size of the Warburg Pincus deal but said it was “significantly smaller” than Thomas H. Lee’s investment today.

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With the Thomas H. Lee deal, Warburg Pincus is now a minority stakeholder, says Barnes, who joined Intelligent Medical as CEO in 2018. Naeymi-Rad is now chairman of the board.

Since the initial Warburg Pincus investment, Intelligent Medical has grown to more than 300 employees, most of whom work in the Chicago-area, Barnes says.

Thomas H. Lee’s investment will help finance even more growth, the company says, allowing it to develop new products and expand commercial relationships with hospitals and other healthcare providers.

“This is a really exciting time for growth" for Intelligent Medical, Barnes says. “COVID put a really big spotlight on data quality and healthcare, and how it’s no longer acceptable for us not to improve clinical data quality. We’re sitting right at the crossroads of that.”

According to data from PitchBook, private-equity deals in Illinois-based healthcare companies grew to $35 billion in 2021, a figure inflated by the mega-buyout of hospital supplier Medline Industries. Excluding that deal, private equity deal-making in Illinois totaled about $1.7 billion in 2021, about the same as 2020 but down from $2 billion in 2019.

Since its founding in 1971, Thomas H. Lee has raised more than $30 billion of equity capital and invested in more than 160 companies. primarily in healthcare, financial technology and other tech services.

Thomas H. Lee purchased a large stake in Chicago-based Guaranteed Rate, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, in 2017. More recently, Thomas H. Lee led a $100 million funding round for logistics software company FourKites, also based in Chicago.

This story firs appeared in our sister publication, Crain's Chicago Business.