Health IT, Startups

Arsenal Health CEO on athenahealth acquisition and the future of physician practice management

"Practice management is totally ripe for improvement just in the design interface alone," said Chris Moses, Arsenal Health CEO and now director of product innovation for athenaCoordinator at athenahealth.

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Chris Moses (left) and Joel Sutherland (right) confer with a team member.

Age, condition, timing, the patient’s track record. If this were Jeopardy, the correct answer would be, What are some indicators that a patient will cancel their doctor’s appointment? The answer to that question is the kind of information for which physicians and hospitals are prepared to pay. The machine learning engine that helps generate these answers propelled Arsenal Health’s acquisition by athenahealth last week.

In an interview, Arsenal Health CEO Chris Moses talked about his company’s business and product development plans fit into athenahealth’s machine learning aspirations.

Although the company started life in 2012 as Smart Scheduling, it recently changed its name to allow for wider applications of its approach. Moses co-founded the company with Joel Sutherland.

Moses said that it built the machine learning engine behind its business but has tweaked the user experience to make it more intuitive in response to feedback it received as part of Arsenal Health’s journey through athenahealth’s accelerator, More Disruption Please.

“Practice management is totally ripe for improvement just in the design interface alone,” Moses said. About 800 providers of various sizes use its smart scheduling app.

So what are some predictors of patient cancellations and no shows? It depends who the patient is seeing — the physician may have a higher rate of cancellations and no shows than others in the practice. Appointments scheduled six months ahead of time are also more likely to be canceled than ones with a shorter time frame because patients forget. Young patients are also more likely to miss appointments. Although the insights are not exactly surprising, Moses said gaining access to athenahealth’s API has increased its ability to detect patterns and to help practices spot potential performance issues.

Moses acknowledges that other groups approached its company interested in a deal, but he said its cultural integration with athenahealth and the relationships Arsenal Health has forged within the business helped make up its mind. He declined to elaborate on the financial terms of the deal. But the move reflects the preference and appetite for strategic acquisitions in healthcare. In addition to athenahealth, its investors include Rock Health, Healthbox and some angel investors — Moses declined to name them.

So how will it fit into athenahealth? It’s joined the athenaCoordinator Enterprise team — its cloud-based care coordination and patient access service — with a new title for Moses: director of product innovation for athenaCoordinator. He and Joel are bringing their developers with them but an account manager and a sales professional will go their separate ways.

Its current focus is on improving practice management inefficiencies by applying predictive analytics to things like patients with outstanding bills — who is more likely to pay. Other areas include care plan and medication adherence, care coordination and hospital readmissions. Another is improving the way clinical documents are labeled to reduce the manual work required to find them.

Photo: athenahealth

 

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