Athenahealth has purchased Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s webOMR, a web-based clinical application EHR developed by the academic medical center, which should put athenahealth in a stronger position to capture hospital market share.
In January, cloud-based EHR vendor athenahealth announced it had acquired Atlanta-based Razor Insights, as part of a move into the small rural hospital EHR space. Today’s news represents a further and more visible push, with a high-profile partner in Beth Israel, which crafted its own EHR system instead of working with vendors like Epic or Cerner.
As part of the purchase, for which the price was not disclosed, the two organizations will collaborate on the development of athenahealth’s acute care service offerings that will be geared toward large hospitals and health systems.
Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Needham, a 58-bed community hospital, will serve as the alpha development site for the new inpatient service. Needham health care providers will use newly developed athenahealth inpatient functionality alongside their existing software portfolio.
Additionally, Beth Israel Deaconess Healthcare, which is comprised of 185 providers across 38 Massachusetts locations, will begin a phased implementation of athenahealth’s athenaOne suite of EHR, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement services.
It’s a big move for athenehealth, which in the past focused its EHR and revenue cycle tools on physician practices, not inpatient acute care hospitals.
Developed over the past three decades, webOMR was one of the first hospital-built, inpatient and outpatient EHR systems, as well as the first self-built EHR system to achieve Meaningful Use Certification by the federal government.The deal will help athenahealth accelerate its entry into the 100-bed-and-over hospital market, which accounts for approximately 48 percent of all hospitals in the U.S.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The culture of Beth Israel Deaconess has always been to challenge the status quo, to be a first mover focused on value – the highest quality at the lowest cost,” said John Halamka, MD, BIDMC’s CIO, in a statement. “We know the days of self-built information systems will not last forever. We want to continue to innovate while also leveraging the scale of a commercial vendor.”
