athenahealth to Enter Hospital Market

athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based services and mobile applications for medical groups and health systems, recently announced it will acquire RazorInsights, a leader in cloud-based EHR and financial solutions for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. By uniting the strengths and resources of athenahealth and RazorInsights, the combined organization is positioned to introduce new cloud-based services tied to the delivery of clinical and financial results for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. In addition to positioning athenahealth to serve a new segment of the health care market, athenahealth expects this acquisition to accelerate its work to advance connectedness across the care continuum.

athenahealth plans to leverage RazorInsights' inpatient expertise and award-winning technology to extend its presence into the 50-bed-and-under inpatient care environment, which accounts for approximately one-third of the US hospital market. This move builds upon athenahealth's established position in the ambulatory space, where it serves more than 59,000 health care providers and has achieved Best in KLAS recognition for its revenue cycle management, EHR, and patient engagement services.

"Today's hospital market is woefully underserved when it comes to IT systems and IT partners that are accountable for reducing costs, increasing quality, and enabling a better patient experience," says Jonathan Bush, chairman and CEO of athenahealth. "With RazorInsights, athenahealth will immediately be injected into the inpatient care environment; this is a natural extension for our cloud-based services, will tremendously grow our network knowledge, and will accelerate our introduction of results-oriented, inpatient solutions that hospitals can confidently invest in and demand accountability from."

Like athenahealth, a company with a long-standing commitment to supporting the needs of independent physician medical groups, RazorInsights got its start serving a struggling corner of the health care industry—one with an acute need for affordable and scalable EHR options. Today, both companies offer cloud-based solutions as an alternative to on-premise software implementations, which require large upfront and ongoing expenditures to install and operate.

"In light of pressures to consolidate, and in some cases, even shut down operations, there is a large and growing market for technologies and services that enable hospitals to deliver higher levels of patient care, reduce costs, and more effectively manage care at the population level. By teaming with athenahealth, we can accelerate our common vision to help health care provider organizations of all sizes remain independent and thrive despite market challenges," says Reed Liggin, president of RazorInsights. "Since our inception, RazorInsights has focused on helping rural, critical access, and community hospitals be as efficient as possible within an environment of increasing regulatory demands and workflow processes. We believe that with athenahealth, we can expand the benefits we deliver to our current customers, and together introduce a new class of services that will overcome both industry pressures and the shortcomings of traditional EHR offerings."

athenahealth expects the addition of RazorInsights to bring many advantages and synergies to complement and extend athenahealth's presence across the health care market, as well as speed the development of future solutions that can advance connectedness across all phases of the care continuum:

• Strong customer base: RazorInsights has deployed its solutions across 25 health care provider organizations and has presence in 15 states.

• Leadership in meaningful use attestations: RazorInsights is among the first in the nation whose clients have achieved stage 2 meaningful use—something less than 35% of hospitals could claim as of December 2014. RazorInsights also achieved 100% client attestation for meaningful use stage 1.

• Complementary and award-winning cloud model: RazorInsights' cloud-based, open platform will allow athenahealth to integrate and build innovations and workflow processes to serve its growing client base. RazorInsights' EHR has been recognized on the Medical Economics Top 50 EHR list, as CIO Review's "20 Most Promising IT Vendor Solutions," and with a Fierce Innovation Award from FierceHealthcare.

• Increased network knowledge: By extending the reach of athenahealth's national cloud network to support new market segments, athenahealth expects to broaden its scope of network insights and domain knowledge, and thereby improve its ability to streamline operations and enhance care coordination for current and future clients, as well as enable health information to follow patients across all care settings.

• Talented team: RazorInsights brings a dedicated, talented team whose health care knowledge and expertise has established the company as a leader in the rural, critical access, and community hospital market. Located in Kennesaw, Georgia, the RazorInsights team will make a natural and complementary addition to athenahealth's growing Atlanta office.

Source: athenahealth