Dive Brief:
- Cloud-based billing and EHR solutions provider athenahealth has picked up hot startup Razorinsights, a key acquisition that will enable its move into the lucrative hospital EHR space, according to a company press release.
- The company, which serves nearly 60,000 office-based medical professionals already, intends to use Razorinsights' expertise in rural hospitals and its proprietary technology to move into the 50-bed and under sector. This niche accounts for one-third of all hospitals in the US.
- "What we want—and what providers need—is to be able to follow the bouncing ball from the doctor's office to wherever care goes and capture and coordinate that care," wrote Jonathan Bush, athenahealth's CEO, in a blog post Wednesday."With the acquisition of RazorInsights, we are following that ball into the inpatient hospital space—one we have not entered to date."
Dive Insight:
Athenahealth is doing what the company has already proven it does well—acquire small, but highly-promising, companies that can fill gaps in its market coverage. Aside from its $293-million acquisition of Epocrates, its track record demonstrates its shopping habits to be affordable and targeted.
According to Forbes, the company bought MedicalMessaging.net for nearly $8 million in 2008, and picked up Proxsys for $28 million in 2011, making the company part of its care coordination and population health offering.
And if any executives want a glimpse into athenahealth's rules of engagement when they acquire these kinds of companies, they don't need to look any further than Bush's own blog:
"First we're going to move about 25 members of the RazorInsights team from their office in Kennesaw to our neighboring office at Ponce City Market in Atlanta, Georgia," Bush wrote in yesterday's post. "Then we're going to get to work building physician inpatient workflows into our cloud-based network and plug our athenaClinicals EHR workflow into RazorInsights. Just like documenting an office visit, physicians on the athenahealth network will soon be able to document a bedside visit, too. RazorInsights clients can look forward to a streamlined workflow and access to knowledge that helps them better make care decisions."
With Citigroup reiterating its "buy" position on athenahealth stock, it looks like the analysts are signing off on Bush's approach.