WATERTOWN, MA – It's been a good 2011 so far for athenahealth. So good, in fact, that it went out and bought a vacation home.

In July, athenahealth announced its second quarter financials, and they were attractive numbers. Total revenue for the three months ending June 30, 2011 was $77.9 million – up 33 percent from $58.6 million for the same period last year.

“Midway through the year, we are ecstatic to see athenahealth’s growth, operations and financial house in such good order because it gives us more time, money and energy to focus on our clients,” said athenahealth Chairman and CEO Jonathan Bush.

Toward that end, athenahealth also announced its purchase of a property in Northport, Maine, for $7.7 million this summer. The facility, called Point Lookout – 396 acres overlooking Penobscot Bay, dotted with 106 cabins that can accommodate 260 guests – is not far from the mid-coast town of Belfast, where athenahealth employs 300 people.

It will serve as the company’s new client and employee training center, allowing management to convene with existing and prospective large group and enterprise clients to counsel, train and facilitate the implementation of its technologies. The idyllic setting will also offer a spot where athenahealth can gather providers from across the country to discuss critical issues affecting investments in healthcare IT. Point Lookout represents "a physical asset that can serve as an educational, training and collaboration hub for prospective and current clients," said Bush.

But a much bigger deal this summer was athenahealth's acquisition of Proxsys, a Birmingham, Ala.-based provider of cloud-based care coordination services between physicians and hospitals, specialists, labs, imaging centers and ambulatory surgery centers. It was snapped up for $28 million, with the potential for additional consideration of up to $8 million, based on reaching certain unspecified milestones.

Proxsys' expertise with care coordination, order transmission, referral management, hospital patient registration and insurance pre-certification will help accelerate the development of athenahealth’s growing care coordination service, known as athenaCoordinator. “We have a vision for how healthcare information exchange ought to work, and Proxsys represents a critical element of achieving that vision,” said Bush.

athenahealth will integrate Proxsys and its service offerings with athenaNet, its cloud-based platform, enabling athenaCoordinator service to move patients, with their clinical and insurance data, from the ordering provider to order recipients on a transaction fee basis.

Proxsys founder and president George Salem said the deal would help assuage a "tremendous amount of administrative pain, liability, cost waste, and redundancy" that has been "bottle-necking the flow of vital health information." He added that his firm's partnership with athenahealth would help support "a broad marketplace for this information, making exchange easier for hospitals, providers, and patients.”

David Harvey, athenahealth's vice president of product strategy said the deal "evolved pretty quickly." Certain things about Proxsys "really resonated" with the athenahealth brass, he said. First, "they were a cloud-based company, just like us." Second, "they're a very service-oriented company."

Beyond their great technology, "they have clinicians staffed onsite in Birmingham, that are working with payers and with their Proxsys clients all day long to make sure those orders coming into their system are certified and pre-authed properly, so when that patient gets to the hospital, the hospital has a high likelihood of getting paid for that procedure."

In fact, "they have another group of workers who pick up the phone and call patients to prepare the patient for that upcoming visit at the Proxsys hospital client and to notify patients what their expected payment will be at the time of service. They will even collect payment in advance of the service about 30 percent of the time when they call those patients."

That service fits in with athenahealth's ethos "We look to areas within healthcare that just scream for help and for efficiency – for those uglies in healthcare – and Proxsys had found one that we really hadn't gotten to yet. We loved that."

Strategically, "we believe that through this acquisition we can create a viral approach to selling our services," says Harvey. "Proxsys has 51 hospital clients that are receivers of orders, and we're certainly going to go to them and talk about two things: one, would they like their employed physicians to be on athenaCollector, athenaClinicals and athenaCommunicator; and two, would they like to initiate an affiliate program in the community where they promote those to their affiliated docs."

Proxsys also has 8,000 physicians that send the orders to those 51 hospitals, and "we're going to begin an effort to reach out to them as well," said Harvey.

"We believe if we can get senders and receivers on the same national network, there's a great deal of promise for improving the quality of care, improving the efficiency of those transactions and providing better visibility on those orders," he adds. "Today, when an order goes out to a provider, whoever sends that referral to the hospital loses visibility into what happens to their patient at that point. Often, they don't get good reporting back from the hospital or the specialist. Creating a closed-loop is another synergy we'll get by marketing to those hospitals."