Allscripts acquires dbMotion, Jardogs

In a move to broaden its capabilities across multiple care venues and achieve interoperability with both its own products and with multiple other vendors' systems, Chicago-based Allscripts has acquired dbMotion and Jardogs.

Allscripts, a developer of electronic health-record systems for office-based physicians and hospitals, made the announcement Tuesday at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society convention in New Orleans.

The acquisition of dbMotion, a developer of system interfaces and data analytics tools for providers, brings to Allscripts “a strategic platform for care coordination and population health management that integrates discrete patient data from diverse care settings, regardless of IT supplier, into a single patient record,” the company said in a news release.

In addition, dbMotion products also will provide Allscripts customers with the tools to create clinical data repositories “with semantically normalized patient data, point of care tools, a physician portal, population tools and an analytics gateway.” DbMotion has offices in Pittsburgh and international offices in Hod HaSharon, Israel.

Jardogs, Springfield, Ill., is the developer of a personal health record, tools for outcomes management and home monitoring, as well as an in-office kiosk for automating patient registration and billing.

Allscripts called the buyout of dbMotion “a natural evolution” that began with a partnership in 2009 and led to an equity investment by Allscripts in dbMotion in 2011, the company announced.

In 2006, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center paid $25 million for a 25% share in dbMotion, or $1 million per percentage point of ownership. It was bought out with the newly announced acquisition, a company spokesman said.

Allscripts said in its news statement and through two spokespersons that it acquired the balance of dbMotion—including buying out UPMC and other investors—for about $235 million, including the value of its earlier investment. The deal cost Allscripts $145 million in cash, $50 million of Allscripts common stock “and $40 million in cash via a note payable, due within 18 months,” the company statement said. Allscripts will finance the deal with cash on hand and fund the transaction with existing cash and borrowings under its revolving credit facility.

“They have a phenomenal platform,” Cliff Meltzer, executive vice president of solutions development for Allscripts, said in a telephone interview. “A number of our major clients installed it. It was originally designed for health information exchange, but we recognized the potential around care coordination and population health management, which is a far more interesting area where healthcare is going. This involves homecare, retail, the interaction with the patient, the physical longitudinal view of where the patient has been.”

Meltzer said the dbMotion systems could be used for internal integration of Allscripts' own ambulatory and inpatient systems, as well those between Allscripts and other EHR vendors.

“There are different levels of integration,” Meltzer said. While it can bring together Allscripts' products, “its long-term value is outside,” he said.

In an interview the day before the announcement, Allscripts CEO Paul Black said the company would either build or buy a data-analytics system, but wouldn't specify which. The announcement of a deal with dbMotion addresses that need, Meltzer said.

Allscripts ranks No. 2 behind market leader Epic Systems and among more than 300 vendors in the number of ambulatory-care physicians and other “eligible professionals” that have used its complete EHR systems to achieve Stage 1 meaningful use under the federal EHR incentive-payment program, according to data from the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. Allscripts ranks No. 5, however, in complete EHR systems for hospitals, the federal data, as of December, shows.

Jardogs ranked third behind Cerner Corp. and Allscripts and holds a 10% market share of ambulatory modular EHR systems with 894 customers that have achieved meaningful use, according to data from the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. DbMotion ranks 27th on the list of inpatient modular EHRs.