Lawson Software is looking to push its business intelligence to more areas of the healthcare setting with the acquisition of Healthvision.
The $160 million deal, announced Thursday and expected to close within the month, gives St. Paul, Minn.-based Lawson an integration and application technology platform that will allow the company to deliver data to healthcare providers throughout the system.
“Reducing healthcare costs is a priority for everyone,” said Harry Debes, Lawson’s president and chief executive officer, in a press release. “Healthvision’s solutions address that challenge by giving our healthcare customers access to financial, operational and clinical information across their enterprise. When their systems are connected and data can flow between systems, substantial benefits result. Clinicians can better coordinate patient care, operational processes become more efficient, and revenue activities are processed smoothly and at a lower cost.”
Based in Dallas, Healthvision offers three product lines. Of particular interest to Lawson is Healthvision’s Cloverleaf integration technology, which enables hospitals to connect different software applications. Officials from both companies foresee Lawson’s enterprise software being integrate with Cloverleaf to push clinical, financial and operational information throughout the system.
Healthvision’s Medisuite platform targets the Canadian market with a range of provider applications for laboratories, electronic health records, patient management, clinical systems and public health and community care. The company’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) platform links the entire network, from payers to patients
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The company has 800 clients, officials said, 200 of which are also Lawson clients.
“Healthvision customers get the strength, commitment and leadership of Lawson not only to the healthcare industry but also to the entire suite of Healthvision products,” said Carolyn Jolley, Healthvision’s senior vice president of client services. “Lawson customers can now address their integration challenges, and on the strategic level, this acquisition also gives Lawson and Healthvision’s customers the solid system integration and application foundation to create the exchange of healthcare information demanded by both U.S. healthcare reform and the Canadian government.”
“With Healthvision, we see an opportunity for growth with the system integration technology used within hospitals and used to build HIEs,” added Jim Catalino, Lawson’s senior vice president and general manager of Lawson Healthcare. “Most healthcare organizations have added or acquired multiple IT systems throughout their lives and want to get the most out of these assets. Taking on this integration task themselves requires building, monitoring and maintaining their own interfaces. That’s expensive, time-consuming and difficult and results in large organizations maintaining thousands of interfaces. Smaller healthcare organizations usually don’t have the money or IT resources to even do this task so their systems can’t talk to one another. Big or small, these IT costs and disparate systems add to the big issues healthcare faces in terms of efficiency, affordability and patient care. Healthvision eliminates the need for homegrown interfaces and the cost of those interfaces and allows healthcare CIOs to allocate IT resources to more strategic needs.”