Behavioral health and social services health IT supplier Netsmart Technologies is widening its mission again by acquiring HealthMEDX, maker of electronic medical records for long-term and post-acute care. Netsmart, of Overland Park, Kansas, announced the deal Thursday afternoon. Terms were not disclosed.

Ozark, Missouri-based HealthMEDX serves retirement communities, assisted-living and independent-living facilities, skilled nursing centers and home care providers. Its CEO is Pamela Pure, who previously ran the McKesson Technology Solutions division of McKesson Corp.

This acquisition will enable Netsmart to move closer to its vision of creating a health information exchange network to connect “human services” — long-term care, home health, behavioral health, child welfare — with hospitals and physician practices.

“Our focus is how to better connect the physical health and behavioral health,” explained Executive Vice President Kevin Scalia. “We basically have the full spectrum of care outside the hospital and physician practice,” Scalia added.

Behavioral health in particular has been left behind the rest of healthcare in terms of IT adoption, in no small part because it was mostly excluded from the $35 billion Meaningful Use incentive program. In behavioral health, only psychiatrists have been eligible for federal incentives for installing and using electronic health records.

With the acquisition, HealthMEDX customers now have access to Netsmart’s CareFabric platform, which includes interoperability, revenue-cycle management, analytics, care coordination and patient engagement services.

“Netsmart provides the scale and solutions to help providers evolve to the world of value-based care, the ‘new normal’ for all of healthcare, including LTC,” Pure said in a statement. Pure has joined Netsmart in a senior executive role.

It will take a few months to integrate HealthMEDX technology into CareFabric. “Pam Pure will be working with me and Mike Valentine, our CEO, to map out this integration of whole communities,” Scalia said.

When the integration is done, likely by the end of the first quarter of 2017, Scalia expects Netsmart to be a major interoperability conduit, managing connections to HIEs, hospitals, patient registries, laboratories and physician practices.

“With hospitals now taking on risk,” Scalia said, “we hope to manage transitions back to hospitals.”

This is the second major expansion for Netsmart in 2016. In March, the company moved into home health IT by forming a joint venture with Allscripts Healthcare Solutions.

Netsmart claims to be the largest vendor of “human services and integrated care technology” in healthcare. The company actually traces its roots to the late 1960s.

Photo: Bigstock