Leading vendor of cloud-based services for physician practices, Athenahealth (ATHN) recently launched athenaCoordinator, its new cloud-based offering intended to tackle systemic problems, which have blocked proper coordination of care spanning the health care supply chain.
The athenaCoordinator is the culmination of the company’s takeover of the Alabama-based Proxsys, which was closed on August 31, 2011. This offering supports the company’s pre-existing product lines comprising integrated revenue cycle management (“RCM”), electronic health record (“EHR”) as well as patient communication services. It will permit structured order workflow between physicians and their affiliated hospitals, imaging and surgical centers. Athenahealth is planning to extend the athenaCoordinator service to encompass a wider array of vital health care bodies, such as pharmacies and labs.
The athenaCoordinator is capable of functions, such as order transmission (transmitting error-free orders to hospitals, surgical and imaging centers by permitting doctors hassle-free order entry); pre-certification (cuts down on rejected claims and grows point-of-service collections) and pre-registration (whereby Athenahealth furnishes services to facilitate fulfillment of orders, registration of patients in the healthcare system and collection of self-pay balances). The company envisages that athenaCoordinator will, over time, handle a broader array of clinical data and documentation at multiple points of care.
Despite improved growth prospects, Athenahealth faces stiff competition across all of its operating platforms from established Health IT players such as Cerner (CERN), Allscripts-Misys (MDRX) and Quality Systems (QSII). Nevertheless, the company remains optimistic about the growth prospects in each of its end markets due to the federal stimulus program, which promotes EHR adoption in ambulatory and hospital settings.
Athenahealth’s Software as a service (“SaaS”)-based approach allows for a lower cost and more flexible delivery mechanism that is expected to help the company win deals. We believe that the company’s focused marketing approach is paying dividends, in the form of a large proportion of double barrel and triple barrel deals or cross-selling in which more than one solution is sold to a client.
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