athenahealth acquires scheduling company, its first accelerator investment

athenahealth announced the acquisition of Arsenal Health—athenahealth's first investment via the More Disruption Please accelerator. 

The acquisition will support Arsenal Health’s schedule optimization solution that allows providers to take control of their daily appointment volume by predicting no-shows and cancellations widely available as a native part of athenaNet—moving Arsenal Health from third-party service delivered via the athenahealth Marketplace to a native capability that will be available to customers via athenaCoordinator. 

Looking ahead, according to the announcement, athenahealth expects this acquisition to accelerate its capabilities in machine learning and predictive analytics. This competence, when linked to strong datasets like that of athenahealth’s 74 million plus patient records, offers "tremendous potential to broaden the scope of network insights, and enhance existing offerings through the development of a smarter platform."

"We are thrilled to welcome the Arsenal Health team to athenahealth as it represents numerous opportunities and proof points," said Doran Robinson, vice president of athenaCoordinator. "First, the scheduling service has proven it can be highly impactful to providers, helping ensure that days run smoother, more patients get seen, and more revenue flows in. Second is its potential as an additional on-ramp to the machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence space in healthcare. The prospect of building on Arsenal Health’s technology and combining it with our own valuable data to positively impact care and expand the power of our network is extremely compelling. Finally, the company is a testimonial to what we’re trying to do with our ‘More Disruption Please’ program—provide young health tech companies the opportunity to develop and scale with athenahealth’s support and resources.”

“By joining athenahealth, we believe we can accelerate our growth while effectively testing and advancing our predictive analytics technology," said Arsenal Health CEO Chris Moses. "To date, our success lies in our ability to track client performance, learn the intricacies of how providers work and ultimately predict their needs. We believe that with athena we can continue to improve this offering by leveraging athena’s volume of data to develop a new class of network intelligence-based services that will be well-positioned in an industry moving towards data-driven care."

Chris Moses and Arsenal Health’s current team of data scientists and developers will join athenahealth working under Doran Robinson, who heads athenaCoordinator. Together they will work to build out intelligence-enhanced, data-driven services to power athenaNet. 

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.