Dive Brief:

• After a healthy 2014 which saw Athenahealth hire 1,300 new employees and pick up some new EHR assets, the company expects to have an even more robust 2015, according to a company press release and investor conference call. 
• After acquiring RazorInsights and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's EHR, CEO Jonathan Bush made it clear in the investor's conference call that the company will not abandon its existing products. But there's little question he's thirsty for more growth, observers note.
• Boston Business Journal reported that analysts remained bullish on athenahealth, despite the low margins reported for 2014 (barely $955,000 in operating revenue against $762.5 million in earnings). Cathie Wood of Ark Investment Management suggested that the company is reinventing itself, much like Amazon transformed itself from a book company into a consumer goods company. In athenahealth's case, it's trying transform itself from a company serving medical practices to one that serves the big boys of hospital IT as well. 

Dive Insight:

"My primary focus is to see a deeper penetration into in-patient market and evidence that they are cracking the code in the enterprise," Wood said. "We are looking for reports that athenahealth is getting more enterprise deals. Both are beginning to happen."

Notable in the hour-long investor call was CEO Bush's acknowledgment of athenahealth's failures along with its successes, spinning those shortcomings as part of the company’s growth process.

"We paid prices for over-dependence on one-channel partners, over-focus on ambulatory medicine and limited experience with turnaround situations," Bush said. "These prices were admission tickets, though, to new levels of adulthood, and I think we responded to it rather well." He also talked about the lag-time in getting the Epocrates product to deliver results and how 2014's acquisitions have the company looking up in 2015.

Though Bush has a gift for charming investors and users, he may be more optimistic than the situation calls for. Getting his products into the enterprise, which is already near saturation with products from giants like Epic, Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts and Meditech, is no small matter, and Bush's Steve Jobs act can't change that.

Moving forward in 2015, athenahealth is going to have to spend a little time addressing their EHR security protocols. As the industry discovers more about the lax security conditions at Anthem, every EHR vendor is going to be forced to withstand a higher level of scrutiny with regard to their security precautions in handling patient data.

That being said, Bush may just pull it off. If nothing else, he's an expert on getting people to take his ideas seriously. If he can get the ear of the mid-sized hospitals still searching for EHR solutions, he may well win them over.