Allscripts’ Acquisition of dbMotion and Jardogs – Making Good on the Community Promise?

March 5, 2013

What Allscripts’ acquisition of dbMotion and Jardogs means to you

The big announcement of Allscripts’ acquisition of dbMotion and Jardogs from the floor of HIMSS in New Orleans this morning should significantly benefit the Allscripts client base. The acquisition of dbMotion will mean a tighter integration between Sunrise, TouchWorks EHR, and the dbMotion community solution. Jardogs brings a robust patient engagement tool to help meet Meaningful Use 2 requirements to the Allscripts community. We are working on a more comprehensive analysis on how this will impact Allscripts clients in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned…

For the last few years we’ve heard the buzz words thrown around: “Community”, “Interoperability”, “Open”, “Coordination”, “Population Management” and so on. But in reality, all most of us have seen to date are first stabs at regional HIE projects and development blitzes to meet MU measures.  The vision and outcomes that these words collectively promised has eluded most of us as the practicalities of today continue to leapfrog the necessities of tomorrow.  With Allscripts’ announcement this morning of the acquisitions of dbMotion Ltd. and JarDogs LLC, which come just a day after announcing it will be joining with other major HIT vendors as a founding member of the newly created standards based interoperability collective CommonWell Health Alliance, they have signaled loud and clear that their slogans of late are far more than just that.

The move to bring two innovative, vendor agnostic solutions under the Allscripts umbrella is exciting news for Allscripts clients and should hopefully prove to be good news for any community Allscripts products exist in and beyond.  Both dbMotion and JarDogs are proven and established solutions. By working together they provide the foundation for moving way beyond helping their clients to meet meaningful use measures, and truly into the realm of improving patient care.  Hopefully, it will also greatly simplify and strengthen the connectivity discussions being had across the health care industry as organizations attempt to weed through numerous options before them.

As with all acquisitions and strategy shifts, it will remain to be seen exactly what comes from acquiring JarDogs and dbMotion over the long term.  However, it is clear that the drivers of this move are strong in the industry today and whether they are primarily in the form of governmental regulations, payment reform, or the ever present desire to improve patient care, they are not abating any time soon.  For a company, clearly and self admittedly in transition, becoming the leader in the community health model would be a big win for Allscripts a whole.

The vision goes beyond basic interoperability in the sense of simply sharing patient information across different systems.  It is the ability to use that aggregated data for more thorough analytical ends as well as a more complete patient interaction.  Meaningful Use has forced us to start calculating quality measures and driving patient engagement through reporting tools and patient portals. But our efforts, like our data, have been separate and in parallel.

Peter Chaloux
Manager of Technical Services, MBA HealthGroup

More information about Allscripts’ acquisition of JarDogs and dbMotion, and the respective products, is available at the following links:

Allscripts – http://www.allscripts.com

JarDogs – http://www.jardogs.com

dbMotion – http://www.dbmotion.com

Allscripts’ Acquisition of dbMotion and Allscripts – http://investor.allscripts.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112727&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1792215&highlight