BIDMC sells inpatient EHR to Athenahealth

Just weeks after officially entering the hospital EHR market with the purchase of a small vendor serving rural, community and critical access hospitals, athenahealth is taking the full plunge, acquiring the EHR technology of a major academic medical center.

Athenahealth, of Watertown, Mass., said Tuesday that it has purchased webOMR, the home-grown, web-based EHR and clinical applications platform of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston. The transaction price was not disclosed.

The hospital, its affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Healthcare network of 185 providers in Massachusetts and athenahealth also agreed to co-develop the vendor’s cloud service for inpatient care and to implement other athenahealth technology.

Beth Israel Deaconess-Needham, a 58-bed hospital in suburban Needham, Mass., will be the alpha test site for athena’s inpatient service, according to a press release. In addition, BID Healthcare outpatient sites will transition to the AthenaOne suite of EHR, revenue cycle management and unspecified patient engagement services.

“The culture of Beth Israel Deaconess has always been to challenge the status quo, to be a first mover focused on value--the highest quality at the lowest cost,” BIDMC CIO John Halamka, MD, said in the press release. “We know the days of self-built information systems will not last forever. We want to continue to innovate while also leveraging the scale of a commercial vendor.”

This news comes less than three weeks after athenahealth announced the acquisition of RazorInsights, a Kennesaw, Ga.-based maker of EHR and management technology for smaller hospitals. (Athena said Tuesday that the webOMR deal “will speed its entry into the 100-bed-and-over hospital market.”)

Athena’s intention to enter the inpatient market had been widely known, as outspoken CEO Jonathan Bush has talked about it since at least 2013.

At HIMSS14 nearly a year ago, the company introduced a clinical integration and communication engine for hospitals called AthenaCoordinator Enterprise. At the time, Athenahealth Chief Medical Officer Todd Rothenhaus, MD, said that the product was more a “Trojan horse into hospitals” rather than a true EHR.