Beth Israel Deaconess, athenahealth both bullish on the cloud

As already reported, cloud-centric health IT vendor and services provider athenahealth has acquired webOMR, the home-grown EHR and clinical applications platform of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Combined with the Watertown, Mass.-based company’s purchase of RazorInsights last month, the webOMR deal instantly makes athenahealth a legitimate player in the inpatient and enterprise IT markets.

The acquisition fills a gaping hole in athenahealth’s product line and helps the Harvard University-affiliated BIDMC move its own IT operation forward.

“[T]he days of self-built systems cannot last forever,” BIDMC CIO John Halamka, MD, MS, wrote on his Life as a Healthcare CIO blog. “While we want to continue to innovate, we know that commercial vendors will be able to leverage their knowledge and capabilities to build future platforms at larger scale.”

In an interview with Clinical Innovation + Technology, Halamka said that other industries have gravitated to IT innovations such as social media and the cloud. “Healthcare hasn’t been so agile,” he noted.

The old client-server paradigm is becoming difficult to maintain in the world of quality reporting and accountable care, according to Halamka. “Innovation and agility are required for these emerging business models,” he said.

BIDMC first built a decentralized EHR in 1998, back when “application service provider” was the preferred term. “Isn’t it great when you just get lucky?” Halamka joked. The technology now supports 83 locations across 450 square miles in the Boston area.

“We want to think of services instead of software,” Halamka said. BIDMC is now able to get new practices up on webOMR in a couple of weeks thanks to the cloud architecture. “The DNA of Beth Israel Deaconess very much matches athena’s.”

Indeed, athenahealth CEO and Chairman Jonathan Bush is an unabashed backer of cloud services over client-server technology, to the point that he and athenahealth staged a jazz funeral at HIMSS13 in New Orleans to mark the “death of software.” At previous HIMSS conferences, he outfitted his staff in shirts proclaiming that software was “dead x 4,” as in, “dead, dead, dead, dead.”

Said Bush, “We continue our journey toward the healthcare internet.”

Bush called webOMR possibly the only cloud-based EHR for tertiary care that has helped a hospital meet Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Bush said athenahealth went looking for acquisitions last year because many customers and prospects were not confident the company could help them with workflow and revenue-cycle management in their hospitals. Bush said athenahealth now derives half its revenue from hospital companies, a number likely to rise now that the vendor has an inpatient EHR to offer.

Halamka said athenahealth is buying know-how as much as the programming code. As part of the deal, BIDMC will provide athenahealth with five experts, one day a week for two years to make sure the vendor fully understands webOMR and how the Boston hospital has implemented it. As previously reported, Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham, a 58-bed hospital in suburban Needham, Mass., will serve as the alpha test site for athena’s inpatient service.

“We’ll have their facility to build in and their expertise to build with,” Bush said.

Meanwhile, according to Bush, athenahealth has already begun adding Meaningful Use attestation functionality, insurance precertification and several other enhancements to RazorInsights’ One line of EHR and hospital information system products.