Cloud-based athenahealth is expanding its portfolio to include machine learning and artificial intelligence with its acquisition of analytics startup Arsenal Health.

Arsenal's Smart Scheduling tool has already been effective with athenahealth's providers, officials said. The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, will move Arsenal from a third-party vendor to a native capability available for all athenahealth's customers through its athenaCoordinator network.

athenahealth also sees value as a potential "on-ramp to the machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence space in healthcare," said Doran Robinson, vice president of athenaCoordinator, in a press statement.

In the future, athenahealth's officials say they hope the acquisition will accelerate the company's analytics and AI capabilities, broadening insights and enhancing offerings for its 74 million patient records.

"The prospect of building on Arsenal Health’s technology and combining it with our own valuable data to positively impact care and expand the power of our network is extremely compelling," said Robinson.

Arsenal Health was athenahealth's first investment through its More Disruption Please initiative, which drives decisions based on three pillars: the MDP Accelerator, athenahealth Marketplace and MDP Network.

"The company is a testimonial to what we’re trying to do with our "More Disruption Please" program – provide young health tech companies the opportunity to develop and scale with athenahealth’s support and resources," he added.

"By joining athenahealth, we believe we can accelerate our growth while effectively testing and advancing our predictive analytics technology," said Arsenal Health CEO Chris Moses in a statement. "To date, our success lies in our ability to track client performance, learn the intricacies of how providers work and ultimately predict their needs."