HEALTH PAYMENTS INNOVATOR FILES FOR $100M IPO
Nearly a decade after its launch and expansion under Obamacare, an innovative insurance company with its roots in Norwalk is going public.
Texas-based Signify Health has plans to raise $100 million selling shares to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 2019, Signify Health spent $405 million to acquire Remedy Partners, which was created eight years earlier in Norwalk by Oxford Health Plans founder Steve Wiggins. His idea was to develop a new system for health insurance, with premiums and payments pegged to “episodes of care” covering the span of a patient’s treatment and recovery from an ailment.
In November, Connecticut launched a “Network of Distinction” program for some 220,000 state employees using the Signify Health platform, setting fixed prices for varying procedures such as pregnancy care, colonoscopies or knee replacements that could be provided by more than 200 clinics, including physician groups affiliated with Griffin Hospital in Derby and John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington.
Wiggins remains a board director today, with the combined company run by Signify Health CEO Kyle Armbrester who earlier in his career worked for the Massachusetts-based insurance company athenahealth.
In its IPO filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Signify Health listed its main executive office in Norwalk at the 800 Connecticut Ave. building that is home also to Booking Holdings and its Priceline subsidiary. The company’s shares will trade under the “SGFY” ticker symbol.
Signify Health becomes the first Connecticut company to file for an
IPO this year, not including “blank check” shells formed by investors to put IPO proceeds toward the purchase of an operating company.
IPO filings hit their highest mark last year since 2014 with 262 total. Through the first three weeks of January another 34 companies have filed to go public as tracked by Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich-based firm that tracks IPOs.
A spokesperson indicated the company has 100 employees in Norwalk of 2,100 in all, and that it considers Norwalk as having a headquarters designation alongside Dallas where the majority of its workers are located. The company lists only a handful of open jobs today in Norwalk.
With the 2013 creation of the Medicare Bundled Payment for Care Improvement program, the Affordable Care Act included the episodes-of-care model as an eligible form of insurance coverage. Remedy Partners was one of four early innovators nationally.
Several competitors exist today, including insurers like Oxford Health Plans parent UnitedHealth through its naviHealth and OptumCare subsidiaries, and smaller physician groups that have explored the concept.
Signify Health was formed in 2017 with the merger of CenseoHealth and Advance Health, with a platform to help health clinics evaluate patients in the home. The company competes today primarily with Matrix Medical Network and the inhouse services offered by major insurers, including OptumCare.
Signify Health lost $15.2 million in the first nine months of 2020 on $417 million in revenue, a 13 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.