athenahealth to Acquire Scheduling Optimization Solutions Provider Arsenal Health

Cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) vendor athenahealth announced it is acquiring Boston startup Arsenal Health, a scheduling optimization solutions provider formerly known as Smart Scheduling, Inc.

Arsenal Health’s schedule optimization solution is now widely available as a native part of athenaNet—moving the organization from a third-party service delivered via the athenahealth marketplace to a core capability available to customers via athenaCoordinator, according to the company. Arsenal Health’s schedule optimization solution currently serves over 700 athenahealth providers.

“Looking ahead, athenahealth expects this acquisition to accelerate its capabilities in machine learning and predictive analytics. This competence, when married to strong data-sets like that of athenahealth’s 74 million plus patient records, offers tremendous potential to broaden the scope of network insights, and enhance existing offerings through the development of a smarter platform,” the company said in a news release.

With the acquisition, athenahealth is dipping into its “More Disruption Please” (MDP) Accelerator, as Arsenal Health was the company’s first investment in its accelerator program.

Doran Robinson, vice president of athenaCoordinator, said in a statement that Arsenal Health has the potential to be an "additional on-ramp to the machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence space in health care." "The prospect of building on Arsenal Health’s technology and combining it with our own valuable data to positively impact care and expand the power of our network is extremely compelling," Robinson said.

Robinson also said, "We are thrilled to welcome the Arsenal Health team to athenahealth as it represents numerous opportunities and proof points. First, the scheduling service has proven it can be highly impactful to providers, helping ensure that days run smoother, more patients get seen, and more revenue flows in. Finally, the company is a testimonial to what we’re trying to do with our 'More Disruption Please' program – provide young health tech companies the opportunity to develop and scale with athenahealth’s support and resources."

Arsenal Health’s CEO Chris Moses and his current team of data scientists and developers will join athenahealth working under Robinson, and will work to build out intelligence-enhanced, data-driven services to power athenaNet.  

Arsenal Health was founded by a team who met at a MIT hack-a-thon and decided to apply data science to health care’s scheduling problem. athenahealth made an investment in 2014 and installed Arsenal Health at its Watertown campus, and has since fast-tracked adoption of the company’s service.

Moses said in a statement, "By joining athenahealth, we believe we can accelerate our growth while effectively testing and advancing our predictive analytics technology. To date, our success lies in our ability to track client performance, learn the intricacies of how providers work, and ultimately predict their needs. We believe that with athena we can continue to improve this offering by leveraging athena’s volume of data to develop a new class of network intelligence-based services that will be well-positioned in an industry moving towards data-driven care."