Electronic Health Reporter

athenahealth, Inc. (Nasdaq:ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based services and mobile tools for medical groups and health systems, today announced its recognition as a leader in interoperability in the KLAS EMR Interoperability 2014 reportⁱ. The report, which was released today, surveyed 220 participants across inpatient and ambulatory settings. Practices as small as 1 to 10 providers and hospitals with more than 1,000 beds were included in the survey.

athenahealth received the most favorable ranking among select vendorsⁱⁱ for its overall contribution to its clients’ interoperability success, inter-vendor cooperation, and incorporation of outside data into health care providers’ workflow. The company is also ranked highest of any ambulatory vendor for its support of integration goals.

athenahealth’s unique cloud-based model integrates the entire health care ecosystem—including practices, hospitals, labs, imaging systems, and public health agencies—onto a single-instance national health information platform. To deliver the business results enabled by this integration, athenahealth supports the broadest range of interoperability standards and use cases. athenahealth includes national interoperability services like Surescripts, athenahealth’s integrated health information service provider (HISP) services, and CommonWell Health Alliance natively within provider workflows at no additional cost to clients. In addition, partners integrate directly into the athenaNet® platform via the More Disruption Please program’s athenahealth Marketplace. Unique to its model as a single-instance national service platform, athenahealth enables any client access to existing interfaces on the network, so they can bypass the extended process of implementing new point-to-point interfaces.

The KLAS report states, “athenahealth is a good example of a vendor with brains, if brains symbolize functional technology, innovative approaches to both old and new problems, and an effective strategy for delivering improvements over time. athenahealth’s cloud-based service offers users the benefits of nimbleness, fewer interfaces, HIE-like sharing, and easy upgrades and enhancements.”

“We are proud to be recognized by our clients for our contributions to their interoperability success, but recognize that there is still a great deal of work to be done to achieve true clinical integration,” said Jonathan Bush, chairman and CEO, athenahealth. “As an industry, we need to accept that actual interoperation—not just the ability to interoperate—is key to the success of our clients. We are committed to continuing to lead the industry in this effort and will work tirelessly to ensure our providers have the ability to send and receive information seamlessly across the continuum of care.”

Dr. Thomas Mohr, president and CEO, Pediatric Partners, said, “Our care team is fully committed to providing quality care to our community’s children. To do this effectively, we need all care providers who see and treat these patients to have complete access to a comprehensive view of patients’ health stories. We’re thrilled to work with athenahealth, because they understand the need for true interoperation and are committed to seeing clients like us through to the meaningful exchange of clinical information. Their support has been instrumental in achieving the connectivity we need to support our care teams and quality goals.”

athenahealth continues to make strides in connecting care. The company currently enables more than 1.2 billion transactions annually across more than 46,000 exchange partners. The company has more than 136,000 interfaces already built—36,000 in the past year alone—across its network; including 760 imaging centers, 1,300 labs, and 37,000 pharmacies. In addition, in August alone, athenahealth exchanged over 2.8 million CCDAs with external systems. The company is strongly positioned to support its rapidly growing network and future interoperability success.

For more information about athenahealth’s interoperability efforts, please visit www.athenahealth.com/interoperability.

About athenahealth, Inc.

athenahealth is a leading provider of cloud-based services for electronic health records (EHR), revenue cycle management and medical billing, patient engagement, care coordination, and population health management, as well as Epocrates and other point-of-care mobile apps. We connect care and drive meaningful, measurable results for more than 55,000 health care providers in medical practices and health systems nationwide. For more information, please visit www.athenahealth.com.

About KLAS

KLAS is a research firm on a global mission to improve healthcare delivery by enabling providers to be heard and counted. Working with thousands of healthcare executives and clinicians, KLAS gathers data on software, services, medical equipment and infrastructure systems to deliver timely reports, trends and statistical overviews. The research directly represents the provider voice and acts as a catalyst for improving supplier performance. KLAS was founded in 1996, and their staff and advisory board average 25 years of healthcare information technology experience. Follow KLAS on Twitter at www.twitter.com/KLASresearch.