NextGen Healthcare is buying Entrada, a mobile app vendor that gives applications that enable physicians to utilize dictation to add notes to several vendors’ electronic health records (EHRs) systems.
Industry observers believe the purchase could be the first of various similar acquisitions by electronic health records (EHRs) vendors that sell products in the ambulatory care space, as they attempt to deal the requirement to ease physicians’ documentation burdens.
NextGen Healthcare declared the Entrada acquisition last week. Under terms of the purchase, NextGen Healthcare will pay about $34 million for Entrada. That is about 3 times its 2016 revenues of $12 million; the company reported a $2 million loss in the year ended on the day of December 31.
The mobile app of Entrada integrates with clinical platforms and all major electronic health records (EHRs). It enables a doctor to dictate clinical data into a smartphone and then edit it. The physician can send documentation straightly into an EHR or securely send it to Entrada’s transcription team to complete all required documentation and related tasks. This saves time for the physician and obviates the requirement for either in-house transcriptionists or transcription services.
The purchase brings various benefits to NextGen, contends John Osberg, managing partner at Informed Partners, a consulting firm specializing in the ambulatory care space.
With the acquisition, NextGen Healthcare gets advanced documentation software to make physicians’ lives simpler and a new marketing channel to cross-sell its several product lines—which involve electronic health records (EHRs), practice management, revenue cycle, population health, interoperability, analytics and cloud services—to Entrada customers, specifically those who work in specialty practices.
The addition of Entrada gets NextGen into health information management, Osberg claims. “This is an all-document workflow play. The doctor dictates, (and) the documentation is transcribed and fed into the EHR,” he elaborates. “NextGen gets deeper core competencies in cloud and mobile services.”
The purchase affirms the future that NextGen considers mobility solutions will play in future use of EHR solutions, claims Rusty Frantz, NextGen’s president and CEO. “Mobile health solutions in the palm of the provider are rapidly becoming some of the most valuable real estate in healthcare,” he states.
"Entrada is concentrated on improving clinical workflows and developing opportunities for extra provider and patient engagement for the next generation of care delivery," pointed out Bill Brown, CEO of Entrada. "With NextGen Healthcare’s resources, we can accelerate unlocking the productivity potential for caregivers, finally assisting them gain time to focus on their patients."
NextGen didn’t respond to a request for an interview to discuss the acquisition.
Entrada, Osberg considers, could lose few of its current clients who are ambulatory software rivals to NextGen. For instance, Entrada has a marketing relationship with ambulatory vendor Greenway Health, which also operates a health information technology marketplace where vendors offer their own products, and Greenway could decide to terminate the Entrada relationship.
This kind of acquisition will not be the last, Osberg further predicts. There are competitors to Entrada who now are becoming more appealing to other vendors in the ambulatory software space that are seeking to add operational efficiencies to their product offerings.
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