US-based Athenahealth sets up innovation centre in Chennai

US-based Athenahealth Inc, a provider of online revenue cycle management services for physicians, has announced opening of its corporate innovation centre in Chennai to make continuous improvement in its existing outsourced operations in the city.

Athenahealth has been operating in Chennai through contract relationships with Perot Systems for about four years. At present, it employs around 350 professionals, who are engaged in entering medical records, lab results, and billing and insurance claims, among others.

Addressing a press conference, Jonathan S Bush, co-founder and CEO, Athenahealth, said that the new centre, set up at an investment of $0.5 million, would work in tandem with local operation team to develop new technology platforms.

As a subsidiary, the innovation centre, called AthenaNet India, will have full ownership of its India-based operations.

Besides providing strategy and direction to its operations in India, the centre would also develop enterprise application software. About one-third of the value-added work for its clients in US is expected to come from Chennai, he added.

AthenaNet India will hire about 50 software developers and process engineers. The total strength, (including the outsourced operations in Perot) in Chennai is expected to reach 500 during this year. However, it will not be directly employing business process agents, but will manage all the business process work done for Athenahealth in India.

The centre is expected to develop expertise in accurately capturing key data from complex forms using optical charter recognition (OCR) and other technologies. Other skills will include efficient scripting and management of data-gathering phone calls as well as optimal management and reporting of work queues.

On addressable market size, he said that physician collections in the US was estimated at about $300 billion and that there were 550,000 to 600,000 physicians in the US.

So far, about 6,900 physicians have signed for Athenahealth's web-based software and solutions. The company expects this number to grow by 50 per cent by the end of this year. Hence, the innovation centre in Chennai is expected to play a crucial role in driving continuous improvement of its local operations to handle more volume of works. Moreover, the company expects to outsource more works to India.

The company, which reported a revenue of $54 million in 2005, collects over $1.6 billion on behalf of its clients annually. Through its revenue cycle management services, it was able to increase the revenue of physicians by 16 per cent, said Bush.