29 Mar 2018

ICON Corporate Finance, specialists in M&A for technology companies, has successfully advised on the sale of Optimum Contact, a leading provider of SaaS-based Patient Feedback and Audit Compliance Software, to US global HealthTech provider IQVIA, which was formed following the merger of Quintiles and IMS Health.

Optimum Contact is a leading provider of quality, safety and performance improvement systems to the NHS, including patient feedback, audit compliance, outcomes and more, receiving awards for its work to improve patient safety.

IQVIA is a leading global information and technology services organisation with more than 55,000 employees across 100 countries. IQVIA already supports the NHS at both national and local levels, supplying costing, benchmarking and analytical services. With the addition of Optimum Contact, those services will now be available to over 156 NHS Trusts and Healthcare organisations.

Peter Lane, Head of IQVIA UK & Ireland Healthcare, said “We have a strategic focus on enabling unique insights generated by both clinicians and patients at the front line of care. Optimum Contact’s leading position as an enabler of these insights complements our core analytics capabilities, especially analyzing complex health economy data, and also our performance improvement products like costing and revenue enhancement.”

Chris Williams, CEO of Optimum Contact, said “Bringing the two businesses together allows us to offer further unique and powerful capability to our combined NHS clients and to the wider healthcare and life sciences market. The healthcare support portfolio we will now take to the market is a rich suite of solutions and services that offers potential for step-change performance improvement at clients and expansion into new areas of the market.”

Ian Lyons, Founder and Chairman of Optimum Contact, said “ICON ran a very effective process and secured a great deal of interest in the business, including large US organisations. IQVIA is a perfect fit and offered added value, and as a result the sellers, the buyers, the staff and our customers are all very pleased with the outcome.”

Eddie Harding, Partner at ICON Corporate Finance who led the deal, added “Optimum Contact have carved out an enviable leadership position for their SaaS Feedback, Audit and Performance improvement products in the UK’s Healthcare sector and we were able to generate significant competition for the deal. We are experiencing increasing M&A demand for proven and scalable HealthTech opportunities, especially solutions such as Optimum Contact which are transforming healthcare delivery.”

This transaction represents ICON's third HealthTech deal in as many months.