Success?
On Wednesday, January 14, athenahealth announced it will acquire the cloud-based EHR & RCM company, RazorInsights. RazorInsights’ target market is rural, critical access, and community hospitals (25-50 beds), which aligns well with athenahealth’s strategy to move upstream into the inpatient market. As a part of the acquisition, athenahealth gains ~25 hospital clients currently running RazorInsights’ ONE EHR solution. athenahealth did not disclose any transaction details although early estimates are for a $40 to $50 million purchase price.
Even though athenahealth is already working on developing additional services for the inpatient market, the RazorInsights acquisition represents an effort to fast forward this process. The acquisition opens up a new segment of the market, albeit one that has modest growth prospects that are far below athenahealth’s targeted 30% bookings growth goal. This market also has some well-entrenched competitors e.g., CPSI and Meditech, and others targeting this sector – Cerner with its own cloud-based solution, CommunityWorks. If athenahealth/RazorInsights is successful though in continuing to add additional small hospital clients at a steady clip and additional sales of their population health and care coordination solution (athenaCoordinator), it will present a compelling blueprint for other ambulatory EHR vendors and validates some of Jonathan Bush’s broader vision of what athenahealth represents.