ResMed Inks Deal With AthenaHealth On Brightree's EReferral

Brightree, the wholly owned subsidiary of ResMed Inc. (NYSE:RMD) , recently entered into a strategic partnership with athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) , a leading provider of network-enabled services for hospital and ambulatory clients.

Brightree has released a new solution for home medical equipment (HME) providers to digitally receive orders from more than 62,000 providers using athenaClinicals within the athenahealth network.

From Brightree’s point of view, this deal is like adding another feather in its cap for delivering cloud-based software to post-acute care companies, which look set to improve business performance and patient outcomes.

Notably, Brightree’s information exchange platform, eReferral, enables HME organization to seamlessly exchange information and receive referrals from external referral sources and Hospice customers, who are also part of the Brightree community.

Before eReferral management happened, physicians and HME staff had to manually send, receive and process referrals as well as related documents via faxing and phone calls. Currently, Brightree is working hard to connect more physicians with eReferral Management, thus maximizing cost and time savings for them as well as HMEs.

With respect to Brightree-athenaHealth partnership, offices using athenaHealth can refer patients to the HME providers the same way they refer them to other care settings, by forwarding equipment orders directly from their electronic health records system to the HME providers’ referral workflow within the Brightree system.

Per Brightree, this digitized process will largely reduce the time of the entire procedure on one hand. While on the other, it will improve information accuracy, expediting patient care.

Brightree Prospects at a Glance

Significantly, ResMed’s Brightree software-as-a-service business is gradually growing strong. This business has been part of the ResMed Group for two full years, having registered a stable period of success. On the last reported third-quarter fiscal 2018 conference call, ResMed noted that Brightree systems handled more than 8.2 billion digital requests over the last 12 months. Revenues for the third quarter increased 14% year over year to $39.9 million.

Moreover, analyzing the HME market prospects, we expect this growth momentum to sustain in the long run. According to an article by Freedonia Group, US demand for home medical equipment in 2018 is likely to gain 8.2% to $12.6 billion, driven by technological advances and cost containment efforts.

Share Price Performance

In the past three months, shares of ResMed have outperformed its industry. The stock has risen 8.2% compared with the 5.6% growth of the industry.

Zacks Rank and Key Picks

ResMed currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Two better-ranked stocks in the broader medical space are Abiomed, Inc. (NASDAQ:ABMD) and Stryker Corporation (NYSE:SYK) .

Abiomed has a projected long-term earnings growth rate of 27%. The stock sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

Stryker has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 9.7%. The stock carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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