While the merger of healthcare IT giants Allscripts and Eclipsys dominated the vendor landscape in 2010, the smaller deals that took place throughout the year shouldn’t go unnoticed. Many showed glimpses of a market trying to find the ideal mix of tools and solutions to help providers achieve so-called “meaningful use” of electronic health records.
One of the busier companies this year was Ingenix, the Eden Prairie, Minn.-based analytics arm of insurance giant UnitedHealth Group. During a busy two-month span, Ingenix acquired Picis, a Wakefield, Mass.-based developer of health information areas for high-acuity hospital settings; Executive Health Resources, a Newtown Square, Pa.-based provider of medical necessity compliance and physician medical management solutions for hospitals; and A-Life Medical, a San Diego-based developer of computer-assisted coding tools.
The company also added Axolotl, a San Jose, Calif.-based developer of health information management platforms, to its burgeoning portfolio.
Those deals, along with IBM’s partnership with Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management to create a cloud-based platform, showed a willingness by payers to invest in tools designed to better communicate with providers and, more importantly, consumers.
St. Paul, Minn.-based Lawson Software bolstered its business intelligence platform with the January acquisition of Irving, Texas-based Healthvision, a developer of application integration technology.
“Reducing healthcare costs is a priority for everyone,” said Harry Debes, Lawson’s president and chief executive officer, in announcing the Healthvision deal. “Healthvision’s solutions address that challenge by giving our healthcare customers access to financial, operational and clinical information across their enterprise. When their systems are connected and data can flow between systems, substantial benefits result. Clinicians can better coordinate patient care, operational processes become more efficient, and revenue activities are processed smoothly and at a lower cost.”
Earlier this year saw the merger of two workforce management vendors – Concerro, a San Diego-based provider of emergency workforce management solutions, and RES-Q Healthcare Systems, a Calabasas, Calif.-based developer of staffing and nurse scheduling solutions. The deal highlighted a growing trend in healthcare human resources circles to automate staffing and scheduling and other workforce management functions.
In February, IBM added Chicago-based Initiate Systems to its base, adding master data management tools to its healthcare offerings. In April, Cleveland-based Hyland Software added some heft to its coding workflow offerings with the purchase of eWebHealth, a Reading, Mass.-based developer of medical record workflow solutions (Hyland later added The Computer Systems Company, a Strongsville, Ohio-based provider of business and clinical healthcare software and document conversion services).
And in May, Intuit, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of financial management solutions, improved its healthcare patient-to-provider communications capabilities with the acquisition of Cary, N.C.-based Medfusion.
Also getting into the mix was MedAssets, the Atlanta-based developer of supply chain management solutions.
The company announced a partnership in August with Prodigo Solutions, a Pittsburgh-based subsidiary of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a developer of electronic procurement tools, then acquired The Broadlane Group of Dallas, which offers a host of solutions for supply chain management, sourcing of supplies and services, capital equipment management, procurement, clinical and lean process consulting and clinical workforce optimization.
“The future of supply chain management for healthcare providers will not be determined by group purchasing alone. The MedAssets value proposition will define the industry with the best-priced contract purchasing portfolio, wrapped with leading supply chain technologies and service line measurement tools,” said John Bardis, chairman, president and chief executive officer of MedAssets, when announcing the completion of the Broadlane Group deal. "Our core strategy is to enable broader clinical, financial and operating effectiveness throughout our nation's health system. This strategic business combination enables MedAssets to deliver end-to-end cost management capabilities to healthcare providers.”
