For a public company, Athenahealth has kept a fairly low profile. But that’s been changing over the past year—and the trend continues today.
The Watertown, MA-based health IT company (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ATHN]]) says it is acquiring Proxsys, a care coordination and admitting services firm based in Alabama. The price is $28 million in cash upfront plus up to $8 million in potential milestone payments. The deal is expected to close later this quarter.
Xconomy profiled Athenahealth in 2010 as the firm was ramping up efforts to raise its profile among doctors—the target audience for its Internet cloud-enabled billing and electronic health records services. Now the company plans to integrate Proxsys’s healthcare services such as referral management, patient registration, and care coordination (between doctors and hospitals) into Athena’s service platform, with the goal of improving efficiency and providing better control of patient care for hospitals and healthcare providers. (For more on how this works, check out this company blog post.)
“We have a vision for how health care information exchange ought to work, and Proxsys represents a critical element of achieving that vision,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and chairman of Athenahealth (and former President George W.’s first cousin), in a statement. “This service will be the latest piece of the national health information backbone we have been steadily constructing.”
