athenahealth partners with Intacct to better serve financial needs of hospitals
One of the most inefficient and time-consuming aspects of running a hospital or medical facility is managing the often disjointed back-office financial systems. To help alleviate this burden, athenahealth, a leading provider of network-enabled services and mobile applications for health care providers nationwide, and Intacct, a leading provider of best-in-class cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, today announced a new technology partnership to deliver a comprehensive cloud-based financial solution for hospitals. As part of this strategic partner agreement, athenahealth will integrate and sell Intacct’s financial applications with its revenue cycle management services.
“At athenahealth, we’re focused on being a trusted partner to health care organizations of all sizes, one that enables them to focus more on the practice of medicine and less on the associated business processes and administrative tasks,” said Kyle Armbrester, Chief Product Officer, athenahealth. “By partnering with Intacct, we believe that we’ve vastly extended the value and measurable results we bring to hospitals. Together, we’ve combined our financial, accounting, and clinical expertise to bring to market a new standard of cloud services that we believe will redefine what’s possible when it comes to visibility into, and management surrounding, the entire financial picture for hospitals.”
The health care industry’s transition to value-based reimbursement, coupled with declining cash flows and tightening margins at hospitals, has compounded the already complex health care billing process. With hospitals’ increased need to align financial health with the management of various quality of service benchmarks such as re-admissions, preventative care, risk adjustments, and billing classifications, the introduction of this new functionality for hospital financial teams could not come at a better time.
“Instead of forcing hospitals to rely on a suite of solutions from a single vendor that only scratch the surface of their needs, together, with athenahealth, we believe we’ve created a fully-integrated solution with a new depth of functionality for hospital financial teams,” said Scott Lumish, Vice President of Business Development, Intacct. “Intacct was designed to easily connect with other business applications to help companies achieve peak performance. Working with athenahealth was an obvious choice when it came to extending the value of Intacct to hospitals. This partnership is all about making hospitals more efficient via a streamlined, supported and proven model, which we believe only athenahealth and Intacct can uniquely offer.”
Earlier this year, Mt. Grant General Hospital started using Intacct to improve its accounts payable workflow. “As a small hospital we can easily get bogged down in an avalanche of tasks,” said Greg Schumann, manager of IT at Mt. Grant Hospital. “Since we can only afford to hire so many people, we have to be super efficient in whatever we do. With Intacct, our entire back office team now has the tools to improve our organizational and operational abilities—whether it’s getting invoices into the system, scheduling payments, cutting checks, doing reconciliations, or general ledger tasks. All the features are here and work as advertised in a neat, highly-intuitive package. But the biggest benefit is that Intacct saves our small team valuable time by automating where possible and freeing us from the mundane to tackle more important duties. Bottom line: We can do more with less which helps us stay profitable when many small hospitals are failing.”
Both athenahealth and Intacct provide robust cloud-to-cloud integration capabilities via web service application programming interfaces (APIs). As true multi-tenant cloud platforms, athenaNet® and Intacct will be tightly integrated with athenahealth’s hospital and health systems clients. While commonplace in other industries, the ability to introduce and scale new offerings via a cloud-enabled network is lacking in health care. athenahealth’s introduction of Intacct across its network will happen immediately with general availability to follow in May 2016. This type of strategic partnership is part of athenahealth’s ongoing commitment to fully serve the hospital market to help hospitals achieve peak performance.
To learn more about athenaOne for Hospitals and Health Systems please visit:http://www.athenahealth.com/enterprise/community-hospitals. To learn more about Intacct solutions, please visit http://www.intacct.com.