Four months after Intuit, the maker of small business-focused financial software, announced its acquisition of Medfusion, a maker of front- and back-office software for improving patient-to-provider communications, the merger has completed, with Intuit's Quicken Health Group combining with Medfusion to become Intuit Health.

The deal expands Intuit's software-as-a-service offerings for more than 30,000 healthcare providers – "the vast majority of whom are essentially small businesses," says Brad Smith, Intuit's president and CEO.

Moreover, says Smith, the pairing of Medfusion's patient-provider communication solutions and Intuit's money management software will help "make the clinical, administrative and financial side of healthcare easier" for patients – enabling more effective and efficient patient interactions online and offering consumers easier ways to access and manage their personal health information and settle and track their healthcare expenses.

Intuit Health's patient portal – which so far handles nearly 100,000 transactions each day from some 2.5 million patients – allows consumers to make appointments online, request prescription refills and obtain lab results. It also, crucially, makes managing payments and tracking health expenses easier. (Insurers such as CIGNA and UnitedHealth are partners.)

"We're excited to be folding those capabilities into the overall portal strategy," says Medfusion founder Stephen Malik, now the president and general manager of Intuit Health.

Especially now that meaningful use rules have been finalized.

"We're thrilled with the commitment to data sharing with patients," says Malik. "We feel like we're in a great position to provide an enhancement to electronic health record systems to meet several of the requirements around data sharing and connectivity with patients. We're also happy that they were very explicit in saying for instance that a USB or a CD is not appropriate – that [communication] needs to be through a portal. The meaningful use requirements make a portal a must-have instead of a nice-to-have."

All told, the new company represents the fruition of a "savvy" and, longer-term, "lucrative" move for Intuit, as John Moore from Chillmark Research wrote on his blog, pointing to "the ability to leverage the Medfusion acquisition to embed the relatively new Quicken Health solution right into a physician’s Medfusion-based website.

"Consumers' use of HIT will first revolve around specific transactional processes such as appointment scheduling, online Rx refill requests, and paying bills. Having seen a demo of Quicken Health, Chilmark is impressed with its ease-of-use and rich functionality."

Indeed, a recent survey conducted by Intuit found that 72 percent of healthcare consumers between the ages of 18 and 65 would use an online tool to help them pay medical bills, communicate with their doctor more easily, make appointments and get lab results. Further, 84 percent of patients would complete their medical forms online before doctor appointments if given the choice.

"These are great bellwethers for the future," says Malik. "In the financial services space, it used to be that if you wanted to do a transaction, you had to call your stockbroker – today many of us do that online. So many industries have moved in the direction of online self-service. And it's nice to know from a consumer perspective that there's certainly some pent up demand for that.

"We're very excited about being able to help providers meet the requirements for meaningful use and at the same time we're excited about the functionality we can bring to patients to improve their experience with a provider."