Top 10 Services Companies To Own In Right Now

Top 10 Services Companies To Own In Right Now: athenahealth Inc.(ATHN)

athenahealth, Inc., a business services company, provides ongoing billing, clinical-related, and other related services to medical group practices primarily in the United States. It provides services through the athenaNet, a proprietary Internet-based practice management application. The company primarily offers athenaCollector, a revenue cycle management service that automates and manages billing-related functions for physician practices, and includes a practice management platform. The athenaCollector assists its physician clients with the handling of claims and billing processes to help manage reimbursement. The company also provides Anodyne Analytics, a business intelligence application, which provides physicians and practice managers with insight into practice performance. In addition, it offers athenaClinicals, an electronic health record service that automates and manages medical-record-management-related functions for physician practices, as well as assists medical groups with the handling of physician documentation, orders, and related inbound and outbound communications. Further, the company provides athenaCommunicator that allows practices to manage patient communication tasks electronically, including the use of automated reminder calls; the creation of a self-service patient portal for registration, appointment requests, bill payments, and general communication; automatic generation of emails to patients; and patient education tools. It sells its products through a direct sales force, as well as through channel partners. The company was formerly known as athenahealth.com, Inc. and changed its name to athenahealth, Inc. in November 2000. athenahealth, Inc. was incorporated in 1997 and is headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Jake L'Ecuyer]

  athenahealth! (NASDAQ: ATHN) shares tumbled 12.96 percent to $110.35 after Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn said that athenahealth's stock price could decline as much as 80%.

• [By Jake L'Ecuyer]

  athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) shares tumbled 11.41 percent to $112.32 after Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn said that athenahealth's stock price could decline as much as 80%.

• [By Ben Levisohn]

  Yesterday, David Einhorn offered up a bearish take on Athenahealth (ATHN)–even calling it a “bubble stock”–at the Sohn Conference. Today its shares are paying the price, even as analysts try to support the stock.

  REUTERS

  The defense calls Leerink’s David Larsen and Chris Abbott:

  We continue to be positive on shares of [Athenahealth], as (1) we believe [Athenahealth],  is a true cloud-based HCIT company with deep functionality, (2) while [Athenahealth], also provides a service, this is a very unusual and complicated service that is performed in conjunction with a very sophisticated EMR and billing and AR solution, (3) Epic clearly dominates upstream but we believe there is plenty of room in the community hospital space for [Athenahealth], to win share, (4) [Athenahealth], clearly chooses to reinvest revenue growth back into the business, in order to be able to maintain ~25% y/y top-line growth. We remain positive on [Athenahealth], and our checks indicate that although we’re moving through the stimulus program, there is still a significant professional EMR replacement market opportunity. The HITECH Act may have been signed into law in early 2009, but healthcare reform – in our view – will last for decades.

  Citigroup’s Garen Sarafian thinks Einhorn is wrong about Athenahealth’s margins:

  Einhorn mentioned operating margin estimates are too high and that similar companies to Athenahealth have margins around 10%. Our expectations aren't that much higher, as we estimate Athenahealth will fin! ish 2014 ! with adjusted operating margins of 10.3%, increasing to 11.4% and 12.0% in 2015 and 2016, respectively. While we expect some margin expansion, our absolute margin levels are in-line with other [software-as-a-service] peers 2014E operating margins including: Medidata (MDSO) at 8.9%, Salesforcecom (CRM) at 10.3%, and LinkedIn (LNKD) at 13.8%. While not expecting significant mar

• [By Jake L'Ecuyer]

  athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) was down, falling 5.80 percent to $137.14 after the company reported downbeat quarterly results. Morgan Stanley analyst Ricky R. Goldwasser removed the $133.00 price target on athenahealth.

source from Top Stocks For 2015:http://www.topstocksblog.com/top-10-services-companies-to-own-in-right-now.html