Wauwatosa-based health care consulting firm Tricast LLC has sold a portion of its assets to leading national insurance intermediary Brown & Brown Inc. The transaction closed July 17 for an undisclosed price.
Brown & Brown, and independent insurance intermediary, offers insurance products and related services to business, public entity, individual, trade and professional association clients across the country. Its revenue is about $1.8 billion.
Founded in 1997, Tricast’s revenue has grown to approximately $2.5 million. Tricast provides pharmacy benefit management consulting and services, and also offers a software platform called Reveal used to detect pharmaceutical fraud and rejections in Medicare Part D. The consulting business is being sold in the transaction. Tricast has about 20 employees, 12 of whom are part of the consulting business, said Greg Rucinski, founder and chief executive officer of Tricast. All of its employees will continue to work out of the Wauwatosa office.
The Tricast consulting arm will be integrated with Brown & Brown’s O’Fallon, Missouri-based IPC/EvergreenRx business, and Rucinski will lead the combined entity under the new name PillarRx Consulting.
“This is actually going to be a tactical and strategic focal point, putting an emphasis on health care consulting and some specific focus on prescription analysis,” Rucinski said. “Brown & Brown is historically known as really involved in the insurance industry—it does reinsurance, acquisitions brokerage in both property and casualty, as well as health care,” and the new acquisition will add health care management.
“Over the years, Tricast has developed innovative pharmacy benefit oversight and analytic solutions that we believe will further strengthen Brown & Brown’s existing employee benefits platform,” said P. Barrett Brown, regional president for retail at Brown & Brown, who will oversee PillarRx Consulting. “From an operational standpoint, we believe the combination with Tricast will enable us to serve our new and existing clients more efficiently, as well as offer a broader and deeper range of services. Greg and his team bring invaluable experience and relationships in the pharmacy consulting industry, and we are excited they’ve chosen to join Brown & Brown.”
The remaining software portion of Tricast, which developed the Reveal platform that detects pharmaceutical fraud and rejections, will be led by new CEO Dan Piessens, former vice president of product development at Tricast. The business will be renamed RevealRx.
Rucinski described Reveal as helping insurers find a “needle in a haystack.”
“You might be processing millions of claims a day,” he said. “How do you identify the 200 that need to be worked on?”
