Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong

EHR vendor Allscripts and NantHealth, the digital health wing of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks portfolio of companies, have announced a major cross investment, with Allscripts paying $200 million for a stake in NantHealth and Soon Shiong making a $100 million investment in Allscripts via his personal investment vehicle NantCapital.

"We're taking an important step forward in our strategic partnership that fully aligns our resources and furthers Allscripts' strategy to invest in new technologies that can revolutionize service to hospitals and physicians," Paul Black, President and CEO of Allscripts, said in a statment. "Under the leadership of Dr. Soon-Shiong, NantHealth is pioneering extraordinarily innovative, personalized healthcare solutions that will empower more efficient and effective clinical decisions. We're confident that our joint efforts will help Allscripts lead the way in our vision of delivering open, integrated and precision-based medical solutions to physicians and patients." 

The two companies announced back in March that they would work together to develop a clinical decision support tool for cancer treatment that would include both genomic data and the rest of the patient's health data stored in the EHR. NantHealth brings its Genomic Proteomic Sequencing diagnostic test, or GPS Cancer, to the partnership, as well as care planning tool Eviti, while Allscripts provides scale for implementation with its hospital customers.

"Since the NantHealth/Allscripts partnership began earlier this year, we have come to know Allscripts and its management team well, and I am confident that they can be a major contributor toward the execution of our vision," Soon-Shiong said in a statement. "Allscripts has the technology and scale to become a significant player in a once-in-a-generation shift to personalized medicine. Pursuing unique and innovative partnerships such as this, which can integrate our solutions across the full spectrum of precision care, furthers our mission of building a healthcare ecosystem to drive better outcomes with the highest quality and lowest cost."

Soon-Shiong told the LA Times that the Allscripts investment is the first step toward a NantHealth initial public offering, which he says will happen before the end of the year.

“We feel we have one or two transactions to accomplish, then we will initiate the public offering that we anticipate will happen probably within this year,” he told the LA Times.