Dive Brief:
- athenahealth as announced a 27% increase in revenue, up $43.3 million to $206.4 million in the first quarter.
- The cloud-based IT vendor attributes the gains to signing up more than 4,000 new physicians to their services, including revenue-cycle management, electronic health records and communications.
- Total expenses for the first quarter also rose by $44.1 million to $218.2 million, causing net losses to increase by 10% to $8.8 million.
Dive Insight:
Company executives did not specifically address analyst questions regarding short-term financial implications of its recent acquisitions of RazorInsights and the intellectual property of the webOMR from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "We don't intend to talk specifically about the number of individual Razor deals or that sort of thing," said Kristi Ann Matus, chief financial and administrative officer. "We really bought RazorInsights as a strategic asset along with webOMR to build out our full inpatient solution over time."
Still, CEO Jonathan Bush confirmed that the company is still working steadily towards its goals in the inpatient market, a market that both the RazorInsights and webOMR deals were meant to help develop.
"We are pregnant with a whole bunch of baby hospitals that we just, that we adopted I should say, through the Razor marriage," Bush said. "And they are in all manner of condition, and we want to master survival and prosperity at low fixed cost for the smaller-end, critical-access hospitals. And we are positioned with a war chest of people and effort to go out and take on work for them, so that we can make it better. And we don't know what that will be yet, but we want that team—the two teams that are on that mission—to feel nothing, but green lights from us."
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