Home healthcare tech provider Signify Health announced the acquisition of blockchain-based healthcare payment platform PatientBlox at the end of November of 2020. Signify Health coordinates at-home care for patients. The company has a multi-billion dollar valuation and has been investing in more high-tech solutions as evidenced by its acquisition of cloud-based healthcare tools company TAV Health and merger with payment bundler Remedy in 2019.

PatientBlox was founded in 2017 and is a sister company to HSBlox, which is under the same ownership and management. Interestingly, the joint team had only patented under HSBlox until this year. In May of 2020, the same inventors filed their first patent with PatientBlox as the assignee directed at a distributed ledger/smart contract platform for healthcare payments that is the company’s core product. The application was published just two weeks before the acquisition was announced.

Knowing that patents are valuable assets, it’s likely that PatientBlox filed this application in anticipation of the acquisition. Having a pending patent put the company in a stronger position for negotiations while the sister company structure means that the inventors still maintain control over HSBlox’s technology, which includes blockchain-based tracking for clinical trials. You can assess these patents easily on our Patent Forecast® for Cryptocurrency and view more blockchain-based healthcare IP landscape on Patent Radian, included with every Patent Forecast®.