athenahealth to Acquire Medical Smartphone App-Provider Epocrates

athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), already a large cloud-based provider of electronic practice management and billing services, announced Monday that it is acquiring Epocrates, Inc. (NASDAQ: EPOC) for $293 million. Epocrates is the creator of a very popular app that was used by more than 330,000 U.S. physicians last year.

The companies noted that the final sale price for Epocrates — $11.75 per share – represented a 22 percent premium over the shares’ previous closing price.

The Epocrates point-of-care app is currently used by doctors to call up summaries on drugs, including interaction information and side effects. athenahealth will look to expand the information distributed through the app, noting its 90 percent market penetration as a key driver of the acquisition.

“Our biggest obstacle is that 70 percent of doctors don’t even know we exist,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush told Bloomberg. “Epocrates is to health-care IT what Angry Birds is to games.”

Athenahealth was looking for a new market in healthcare IT since its main business, processing patient payments, has slowed to about 20 percent annual growth.

While athena’s electronic records product, athenaClinicals, is likely to be included in the new app in the short term, the company may also see its practice management and billing service, athenaCollector, eventually on mobile networks.