The sale price of $700 million was stunningly low. Harris has years of profits ahead by collecting maintenance fees and reducing costs as customers go through the time-consuming steps to replace the former Allscripts products.
Northwell represents 12.5% of the 2021 revenue of Allscripts, about $188 million. Companies can provide service when they have one big customer like Northwell paying the bills, but that doesn’t work if you have only small health systems to bankroll support and development.
Harris probably won’t enhance the acquired products, but maybe it is better than Allscripts at keeping the lights on instead of focusing on acquisitions and Veradigm. “Allscripts users will get the cheap corporate experience that comes from harvesting dated enterprise software investments. And they’ll avoid the unfocused, hostile, hot garbage experience that comes from being used as a component to complement another more strategic corporate investment.”
The last publicly traded EHR company bites the dust.
The projected revenue drop isn’t surprising, but the company’s project of a 10-15% drop in EBITDA may suggest that Allscripts has been aggressive on financial engineering around depreciation and amortization, especially on legacy hardware.
“I could never figure out what leadership was doing on the Allscripts side of the house. DbMotion was declining year-over-year in sites, their Population Health Analytics solution was finally put down after years of not being able to calculate the most basic of conditions or generate a cohort list. The DbMotion solution itself was extremely expensive to configure and maintain, and the resulting data was often — troubled. The Community Integration Agent (CIA) that fed it from the Allscripts product was written by the same team that wrote Avenel. Avenel was a bowl of spaghetti that couldn’t do basic EHR functions nor even Alexa-level transcription. TouchWorks was a hot mess, being passed back and forth between continents, having outside contractors rewriting the middle tier only to have to rewrite it again, then to let the entire team that worked on the uplift were let go the week it was released.”
Who wants to take bets that the company will rebrand to Veradigm by the next HIMSS conference and bury the name Allscripts for good?
3 replies (most recent on top)
As long as they stop using India it will get better
That $188m of revenue from Northwell is more than 25 percent of the revenue of the assets they sold to Harris.
Northwell has to be livid about this and could finally be the trigger for them to move to Epic.
If that happens, think about the number of employees Harris will have to dump to cover that loss of revenue.
Word on the street is that Harris’ MO is that they will start to make cuts soon anyway.
Think of Allscripts like the original dawn of the dead. No matter how far down you "burry" the name. It will rise from the grave and continue to haunt the industry. I have no doubt Allscripts leadership (RD) truly believe changing the name will fix the code too..