athenahealth Enters Inpatient Hospital Market
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The recent acquisition of RazorInsight sees athenahealth move into the hospital EHR market.
athenahealth has announced it is expanding its reach by acquiring RazorInsight, marking athenahealth’s entrance into the hospital EHR marketplace. According to Forbes, athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush had previously told the investment community that he was aware that his company would eventually have to offer an inpatient EHR.
As the company press release explains, “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.
Bush explained athenahealth will leverage RazorInsight’s inpatient experience and technology in order to extend its presence into the smaller-hospital market (fewer than 50 beds), which accounts for approximately one-third of the total U.S. hospital market.
“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,” said Reed Liggin, president of RazorInsights.
Colin Buckley, director of research strategy for clinical IT systems at KLAS Enterprises told Modern Healthcare, “If athena comes in with a revenue model that doesn’t require a lot of capital outlays, and athena makes it easy for them financially and their vendors don’t use the time [needed for athenahealth to get up to speed in the small-hospital market] to catch up, there is a huge opportunity. There are a lot of organizations (in this small-hospital market) that are on their first or second EHR.”
In part, those initial purchases were funded by federal EHR incentive payments. Now they need to find new sources of funding, and are experiencing frustration about systems currently marketed to small hospitals, according to KLAS research, which makes them open to athenahealth's new solutions.