HMA And athenahealth Collaborate For Practice Management And EHR Solutions

Health Management Associates, Inc, or HMA, an operator of hospitals, has announced a partnership with athenahealth, Inc, a provider of cloud-based practice management, EHR and care coordination services.

Through this partnership, athenahealth's solutions will be implemented for Health Management Association's employed physician network of more than 1,200 providers operating in fifteen states at more than 300 locations. In addition, athenahealth will offer its suite of services to the nearly 10,000 independent physicians affiliated with Health Management hospitals.

The services offered to Health Management employed and affiliated physicians through the partnership include: Practice Management and Electronic Health Records (EHR), Patient Communication.

athenaCollector is the cloud-based physician billing and practice management solution that reduces administrative red tape and allows physicians to efficiently assess, plan, and improve practice performance while increasing revenue potential.

athenaClinicals provides a cloud-based approach to EHR, delivering greater clinical control and insights into medical practices while boosting efficiency and revenue potential.

athenaCommunicator offers on-demand, automated, and live communication services to support and streamline patient-physician interactions outside of the exam room. This helps practices manage the flow of patient communications and improve the bottom line.

Health Management selected athenahealth after a twelve-month review and due diligence process that involved more than 350 clinical experts, including more than 200 physicians. The evaluation process included detailed questionnaires, onsite and virtual demonstrations, site visits, and clinical template shootouts.

EHRs are a core component to accessing and participating in many of the governmental and commercial payer sponsored quality initiatives that are on the horizon. Health Management will begin to implement athenahealth solutions in markets over the course of the next several months.

"We are excited for the opportunity to work with one of the nation's largest and most progressive hospital companies," said Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth.

"Health Management's physician network will benefit from the power of cloud technology to constantly iterate and extrapolate from the collective clinical and operational knowledge and best practices of thousands of medical groups around the nation already on the athenaNet platform, in turn enabling them to pull out greater efficiencies from their clinical operations. The shared goal is to support physicians so that they can deliver the best care possible."