Yesterday, Intuit announced its intent to acquire HIT vendor, Medfusion, for roughly $91M. This is an interesting and savvy move by Intuit. Interesting in that Intuit is signaling an intent to more directly enter the small physician market. Chilmark also sees this as a savvy move as this acquisition gives Intuit a relatively inexpensive point of access to some 30,000+ physicians that Medfusion currently serves. This provides Intuit an opportunity to sell its financial accounting solutions (Quickbooks) to this market, but we do not beleive this is the real intent of this acquisition.
The real intent is more longer-term and likely more lucrative for Intuit: The ability to leverage the Medfusion acquisition to embed the relatively new Quicken Health solution right into a physician’s Medfusion-based website. As Chilmark has stated many times before, consumers use of HIT will first revolve around specific transactional processes such as appointment scheduling, online Rx refill requests, and paying bills. Having seen a demo of Quicken Health, Chilmark is quite impressed with its ease-of-use and rich functionality. This is truly a consumer-focused product. Providing physician practices an ability to embed Quicken Health into their existing Medfusion website looks pretty sweet from this vantage point and will ultimately put pressure on other physician website vendors.
(Note: last year Medfusion made an acquisition of its own, acquiring the slowly fading PHR vendor Medem for an undisclosed sum.)
Since Chilimark monitors activity in the HIT space, I’d like to bring a company to your attention that you will be hearing more about in the future.
This company has made a significant break-thru with respect to ontological engineering and disease control that is worth note.
It’s a small privately held SaaS development company based in Colorado that has developed and deployed an ontologically-based, GIS integrated disease management decision support system in Africa to fight malaria. This is a significant system that was funded by the global combatants of this disease and the system can be rapidly customized for deployment to other disease environments…especially if you are talking about vector-borne disease.
The company, TerraFrame TerraFrame is interested in leveraging its technology to fight global diseases and is happy to entertain creative conversations to that effect.
For more information please contact Ray Hutchins at rh@terraframe.co