Nearly four years to the day after welcoming Dr. Adrienne Boissy as its first Chief Medical Officer, Qualtrics has announced its next mammoth push into the healthcare industry with its planned acquisition of Press Ganey (PG) Forsta. With the acquisition, Qualtrics would also gain fellow customer feedback management (CFM) vendor InMoment, which PG Forsta bought in July of this year.
The deal is the latest and biggest in a spate of recent acquisitions in the CX tech market and it would have ripple effects across Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), and healthcare. Qualtrics’ acquisition of PG Forsta would:
- Fill gaps in Qualtrics’ CFM offering. Survey functionality is no longer differentiating for CFM providers, so they’re scrambling to find other ways to provide value. For Qualtrics, the addition of ReviewTrackers (via InMoment) would fill a gap for reputation management and ratings and reviews that would help Qualtrics serve location-based businesses – including in healthcare. PG Forsta would also boost Qualtrics’ strategy and research offering with the addition of digital diaries and online panel management.
- Extend Qualtrics’ EX reach into healthcare. Qualtrics would use PG Forsta’s larger footprint in the healthcare space and better understanding of healthcare providers’ needs to gain more access to this market. At the same time, healthcare organizations will gain access to more technology options and EX expertise. Both Qualtrics and PG Forsta were leaders in The Forrester Wave™: Employee Experience Management Platforms, Q2 2025. PG Forsta’s sophisticated EX data and sentiment analysis capabilities are built on the Confirmit platform, which it acquired in 2021.
- Set a new standard in Healthcare experience measurement. Hospitals would gain end-to-end capabilities under one brand, combining Press Ganey’s legacy in patient satisfaction measurement and regulatory expertise with Qualtrics’ investment in analytics and an AI-powered platform. Both are CMS-approved HCAHPS vendors and many health systems already use PG Forsta for compliance and Qualtrics for ongoing insight. What’s more, Qualtrics would gain InMoment’s advanced NLP AI, which would position Qualtrics to differentiate if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) start requiring real-time measurement.
- Force Qualtrics to decide what to integrate and what to sunset. We expect Qualtrics to integrate some components of PG Forsta and InMoment into its offering. How quickly and thoroughly it will actually do that is an open question. Qualtrics’ CX customers will recall the slow pace of integration following its acquisition of Clarabridge in 2021. We anticipate that Qualtrics will maintain its and PG Forsta’s EX platforms separately for a while before sunsetting PG Forsta’s and trying to move those clients to the Qualtrics platform.
Qualtrics is owned by private equity company Silver Lake, in partnership with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Investments. Private equity’s growing presence in CX, EX, and HR Tech markets foreshadows a period of financial tightening, slower innovation, and consolidation – but also greater stability for mature products. Expect Qualtrics to focus on keeping its existing customer bases happy by improving the quality of existing features and adding incremental features.
In the short term, Qualtrics’ acquisition will leave PG Forsta and InMoment clients reeling. Help your organization steer through these changes by:
- Evaluating multi-year agreements strategically. Balance the upside of locking in pricing through multi-year agreements early in the PE ownership period with the need to maintain flexibility in a rapidly changing market.
- Monitor ownership shifts. PE-owned firms often see a second sale within 3–5 years. Consider asking for contractual language requiring timely notification of ownership changes and potential impacts. Build in clear escalation paths and exit options if service levels decline or strategic alignment shifts after a sale.
- Demand roadmap transparency and commitments. Get clarity now on implications for roadmaps and lock in contractual commitments on key features.
- Prepare for potential migration. The potential acquisition brings together multiple platforms under one roof. Assess the likelihood of a larger roll-up and plan for migration now. Begin contingency planning to avoid disruption.
- Tag in key teams now. Engage your legal, privacy, compliance, and security teams to assess and understand the impact of this level of data consolidation. Leverage a multidisciplinary team for contract review and consider new risks around data handling and third-party access.
There’s a lot to digest if this deal goes through. Please reach out if you have questions or want to discuss what this potential merger means for your organization.
