17 Leading EHR Vendors

In an effort to expand its presence in the healthcare market, IT services provider MindShift Technologies has acquired Alpheon, a provider of IT management services.

While the companies did not disclose a value on the deal, MindShift and Alpheon combined generate about $100 million in annual revenue, said Greg Donovan, former CEO of Alpheon, who’s staying on with the merged organization as a senior executive officer.

Like MindShift, Alpheon’s target customer base was small to midsize businesses. However, while MindShift’s focus until now has been organizations in the legal, financial services, education, and non-profit sectors, Alpheon’s specialty has been offering systems, network management, and monitoring services to doctor practices with five or more physicians, said Donovan.

Recently, Alpheon had started to expand its offering of monitoring and management services to small community health centers. The company has also been eyeing offering doctor practices cloud-based, hosted e-health record applications, he said. The acquisition by MindShift gives the former Alpheon the ability to tap MindShifts’ cloud computing services to offer hosted EHR solutions to customers, he said.

The company has not yet decided whether it will offer cloud-based hosted EHRs from any one particular health IT software vendor, or several. The expanded MindShift will consider offering arrangements to hospitals looking to provide cloud-based, hosted EHRs to their affiliated doctors, said Donovan.

“The national trend we’re seeing is that hospitals don’t want to build EMRs, but they do want to offer [the applications] to doctors,” he said.

The acquisition of Alpheon, based in Morrisville, N.C., also helps the Waltham, Mass. headquartered MindShift broaden its geographic reach to the Southeastern U.S.