Lawson is adding integration to its applications, with the goal of moving its business intelligence solutions deeper into the healthcare landscape.

The St. Paul, Minn.-based software company announced on Jan. 7 that it was acquiring Healthvision, an Irving, Texas-based provider of application integration technology. Of particular interest to the company is Healthvision’s Cloverleaf product, which enables hospitals to connect software applications. Officials from both companies foresee Lawson’s enterprise software integrate with Cloverleaf to push clinical, financial and operational information throughout the system.

Jim Catalino, general manager and senior vice president for Lawson Healthcare, said the acquisition fits nicely into the company’s client base, which includes 30 of the top 50 IDNs in the nation. Combining Cloverleaf with Lawson applications, he said, allows the company to push data that normally resides within a hospital out to physician practices, and vice versa.

“It substantially enhances our ability to link clinical information and financial information,” he said.

“Reducing healthcare costs is a priority for everyone,” added Harry Debes, Lawson’s president and chief executive officer. “Healthvision’s solutions address that challenge by giving our healthcare customers access to financial, operational and clinical information across their enterprise. When their systems are connected and data can flow between systems, substantial benefits result. Clinicians can better coordinate patient care, operational processes become more efficient, and revenue activities are processed smoothly and at a lower cost.”  

Along with Cloverleaf, Healthvision offers the MediSuite platform, which targets the Canadian market with provider applications for laboratories, electronic health records, patient management, clinical systems and public health and community care. The company’s health information exchange platform links the entire network, from payers to patients.

“Healthvision customers get the strength, commitment and leadership of Lawson not only to the healthcare industry but also to the entire suite of Healthvision products,” said Carolyn Jolley, Healthvision’s senior vice president of client services. “Lawson customers can now address their integration challenges, and on the strategic level, this acquisition also gives Lawson and Healthvision’s customers the solid system integration and application foundation to create the exchange of healthcare information demanded by both U.S. healthcare reform and the Canadian government.”  

“With Healthvision, we see an opportunity for growth with the system integration technology used within hospitals and used to build HIEs,” said Catalino. “Most healthcare organizations have added or acquired multiple IT systems throughout their lives and want to get the most out of these assets. Taking on this integration task themselves requires building, monitoring and maintaining their own interfaces. That’s expensive, time-consuming and difficult and results in large organizations maintaining thousands of interfaces. Smaller healthcare organizations usually don’t have the money or IT resources to even do this task so their systems can’t talk to one another. Big or small, these IT costs and disparate systems add to the big issues healthcare faces in terms of efficiency, affordability and patient care. Healthvision eliminates the need for homegrown interfaces and the cost of those interfaces and allows healthcare CIOs to allocate IT resources to more strategic needs.”   

The $160 million acquisition is a shot in the arm for Lawson, which reported a 9 percent drop in second-quarter net earnings on an 11-percent drop in revenue. Company officials expect the deal – the first since its $460 million purchase of European firm Intentia in 2006 – to add $60 million to $70 million in revenues and 6 cents to 7 cents in earnings within the year.