Allscripts is seeing strong growth in its life sciences data business as the market heats up among large health IT vendors.
That business, along with the steady return of patient volumes among its provider clients, helped the electronic health record (EHR) vendor post $414 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020. Revenue was down 8% from $451 million a year ago.
The Chicago-based company reported full-year 2020 revenue of $1.6 billion, down 8% from $1.8 billion, according to 2020 and fourth-quarter earnings results.
But, the company reported a quarterly profit of $728 million compared with a net loss of $19 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Earnings for the quarter came to 29 cents compared to 17 cents in the same period a year ago.
Those results beat Wall Street estimates, which projected earnings of 22 cents per share.
For 2020, Allscripts had a profit of $700 million compared to a loss of $182 million in the fourth quarter of 2019.
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"On data analytics and care coordination, we saw strong momentum in the fourth quarter as Veradigm returned to growth. The investments we've made in our integrated data and analytics platforms have led to significant new bookings and larger deals, particularly around clinical research, our national data exchange platform and risk-adjusted analytics," said Allscripts CEO Paul Black.
The company's Veradigm business has the largest linked EHR claims patient database available for research, source from and directly connected to clinical platforms.
"Our data and platform enabled research services are allowing us to capture a larger share of the value chain and will drive growth across the life sciences business," he said.
Other EHR vendors also are jumping into the data market. Health IT giant Cerner is setting its sights on building a $1 billion data business for the healthcare and life sciences industries.
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Allscripts Chief Financial Officer Rick Poulton said that the company’s “extensive data rights” from its ambulatory EHR customers give Veradigm an advantage over competitors.
"We have worked hard for years. It's not just a conversation we've started recently, which is, I think, involved with some of our competitors right now. We've actually been doing this for years, working on compiling that data in a very usable way, linking it to claims data and other data registries. And we've built very extensive relationships across all of the life science community, so people are increasingly recognizing the value what we have and that's what's leading to our growth," he said.
Poulton said the company generated $220 million of new business bookings in the fourth quarter.
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"We also had continued strength and competitive wins of new ambulatory clients. And we also benefited from a strong sales quarter at Veradigm, particularly around life science research and clinical data exchange.
The company has a backlog of $4.1 billion at the end of 2020.
Adjusted EBITDA totaled $97 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared with $74 million in the fourth quarter of 2019.
In the fourth quarter, Allscripts completed the sale of both EPSi business to Strata Decision Technology for $365 million and CarePort Health care coordination business to WellSky for $1.3 billion.
The company is continuing its work to move on-premise clients to move to its Azure-powered hosting services as part of a partnership with Microsoft to use the tech giant's cloud technology to enhance its EHR software.
Looking ahead, Allscripts is projecting first-quarter revenue between $365 million and $385 million and 2021 revenue to reach $1.5 billion.
Adjusted EBITDA is expected to fall between $240 million and $260 million in 2021.