News of the day in the world of Electronic Medical Records

Availity, LLC, a national leader in health information exchange, today announced it has acquired RealMed, an award-winning provider of revenue cycle management services. The acquisition positions the combined enterprise to deliver advanced health information solutions to a nationally growing network that currently includes more than200,000 physicians and providers of care, 1,000 hospitals, 1,300 health plans and 500 industry partners.

“Bringing Availity and RealMed together creates a powerful value proposition for our combined customer base and the markets we serve,” said Julie Klapstein, chief executive officer of Availity. “Availity and RealMed have long shared a commitment to improving clinician and office staff access to meaningful information in real-time, to help improve efficiencies and remove cost from the health care system. Combining Availity’s network and reach with RealMed’s revenue cycle management capabilities empowers physician practices to meet today’s challenges in running their businesses. At the same time, our health plan partners benefit from the advanced provider self-service and automation offered by these tools – increasing provider access to information about their payments helps alleviate expensive calls and manual inquiries to the health plans.”

Availity is regarded as one of the leading health information networks in the country, offering business and clinical information exchange among physicians, health plans, hospitals, and the health care technology partners that serve them. The RealMed solutions focus specifically on improving provider revenue cycles through features including advanced claims editing, real-time tracking, online claim correction, and remittance posting. These capabilities dovetail seamlessly with Availity’s suite of tools that reduce costs and simplify administrative workflows.

“Advanced revenue cycle capabilities benefit everyone involved in the claim payment process, from patient to physician to health plan,” said Klapstein. “When physician practices are empowered with real-time information about the claim payment process, staff can spend less time on paperwork and phone calls and more time serving patients. Efficiency goes up, costs go down, and satisfaction levels increase for everyone – practices, health plans, and most importantly, patients. We are thrilled to have the RealMed team join us in advancing the mission of optimized information access and sharing to enhance the health care system.”

“We couldn’t agree more that the union of Availity and RealMed means enhanced value to our collective customers,” said T.E. Rajagopal (Raj), executive vice president of operations and technology for RealMed. “Our mutual commitment to service excellence and passion for product innovation creates exciting synergistic opportunities to deliver solutions that address and simplify the evolving and increasingly complex needs of our health care customers. While we continue to deliver value through our current products, we will also begin to focus our collective expertise on advancing solutions for tomorrow.”

This combination becomes even more crucial in the market as growth in high deductible health plans is projected to continue. Increased patient payment responsibility means that physicians must have better financial management tools, as studies show more than 60 percent of receivables go uncollected if payment isn’t received at the time of service. The combination of Availity and RealMed’s revenue cycle management tools improves physician collections from both health plans and patients.

In addition to online access via the Web, Availity and RealMed deliver revenue cycle management capabilities through a broad list of industry leading practice management and electronic medical records business partners.

“Today’s physician practices demand access to services through channels that best fit their workflows, and we’re committed to expanding the breadth of options we deliver to satisfy that requirement,” said Russ Thomas, president and chief operating officer of Availity. “When a physician practice wants to exchange information by using their practice management or electronic medical records system, we enable that solution because it goes to the heart of efficient workflow for the physician’s business.”

Availity will maintain RealMed’s business operations in Indianapolis, Indiana. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. [click to continue…]

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