HEI/SBH Honored With Athenahealth 2013 Vision Award

WATERTOWN, Mass., April 29, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – athenahealth, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based services for electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and care coordination, today announced Health Equity International/St. Boniface Hospital (formerly known as St. Boniface Haiti Foundation) as its 2013 Vision Award winner. The Vision Award, which was established by athenahealth as part of its annual User Conference, recognizes individuals and organizations that embody and extend the company’s goal to make health care work as it should. Past winners include Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Abraham Verghese.

athenahealth honored HEI/SBH for its 30-year effort to improve the lives of Haiti’s underserved by providing high-quality and affordable health care and education in the rural region of Fond des Blancs. In particular, the Vision Award honors HEI/SBH for its ground-breaking Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation and Community Reintegration Program—the first of its kind in Haiti—which provides long-term care for victims of the 2010 earthquake. As part of the award, athenahealth is partnering with the Foundation to implement cloud-based electronic health records in rural Haiti; the partnership and EHR implementation will enable robust documentation of the progress and learning from the ground-breaking Spinal Cord Injury Program.

HEI/SBH is a health care and educational non-profit with a mission to create a model of successful, sustainable development in rural Haiti with the help of local leadership and workers. For the past three decades, the organization’s primary focus has been to provide health care to thousands of local patients, despite the lack of infrastructure and shortage of trained clinicians.

After the 2010 earthquake, HEI/SBH was the only Haitian-based health care organization that volunteered to take on the care of patients suffering spinal cord injuries when international relief organizations began to leave. Although it lacked experience in providing for such long-term care, the foundation’s commitment to helping those in great need motivated the foundation to create its Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation and Community Reintegration Program. Today, the USAID-funded project has grown to become internationally recognized for transforming disability and spinal cord injury treatment in the developing world.

As the program developed and its case load increased, HEI/SBH recognized that it needed an information system for clinical documentation that could provide a full picture of a patient’s condition and health history. It was also imperative that HEI/SBH could track the program’s overall progress to effectively plan for existing and future needs of its patients and for the program itself.

Recognizing HEI/SBH as a standout example for care excellence, athenahealth will give its cloud-based EHR service, athenaClinicals®, to the organization. athenaClinicals is ideal for the organization because the cloud-based EHR can operate with just an Internet connection. It does not require on-site infrastructure, such as traditional software servers and cables, or rely on local IT staff and resources.

“We are honored to receive this prestigious award and are thrilled to implement an EHR solution that will eliminate our dependence on paper and let us track patient care,” said Betsy Sherwood, Program Coordinator for the Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation and Community Reintegration Program at HEI/SBH. “Information availability is essential to our spinal cord rehabilitation patients who receive care from a variety of care teams, including wound care, rehab, mental health, and vocational training teams. We’re looking forward to implementing athenaClinicals to share patient information across care locations and better understand the full story of a patient’s rehabilitation.”

Jonathan Bush, CEO and Chairman of athenahealth, said: “This is the third year we’ve given the Vision Award to a true health care leader who’s working to make this often broken system work as it should. [HEI/SBH] has been visionary in its efforts to treat underserved patient populations, despite limited resources. For us, this is also a great opportunity to partner with [HEI/SBH] to extend the power of cloud-based EHRs to an underserved, rural region. Equipped with just laptops and an internet connection, the St. Boniface care team will be able to deploy athenaClinicals to help them achieve their goals of better care coordination and more efficient care delivery. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of those efforts.”

For more information on athenahealth and our vision to create a national health information backbone that makes health care work as it should, as well our suite of cloud-based services for medical groups and health systems, please visit www.athenahealth.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

About athenahealth, Inc.

athenahealth is a leading provider of cloud-based services for EHR, practice management, and care coordination. athenahealth’s mission is to be caregivers’ most trusted service, helping them do well doing the right thing. For more information, please visit www.athenahealth.com or call 888-652-8200.