AdvancedMD Announces Significant Performance Improvements Taking SaaS-based Medical Practice Optimization Software to the Next Level

SALT LAKE CITY and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- AdvancedMD® Software, Inc., the leader in all-in-one, web-based practice management, Electronic Health Record (EHR), and billing applications for medical practices and medical billing services, and Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced significant performance improvements to the AdvancedMD medical practice optimization software platform.  

In its ongoing effort to improve medical practice productivity and provide a superior practice optimization solution, AdvancedMD has performance-optimized its site and added Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service to speed access to its solution across the public Internet. This technology intelligently routes data across efficient Internet paths, automatically re-routing around "traffic jam" areas on the web.

Through these improvements, AdvancedMD has reduced bandwidth utilization out of its SaaS platform by 73%, as measured between April 2009 and January 2010.  In addition, it has achieved a 30% improvement in average transaction round-trip time, a measure of application responsiveness. As a result, AdvancedMD offers a more scalable platform and customers experience these improvements as faster application response rates and a decrease in the burden on their own Internet connectivity capacity.  

During testing, data collected by Akamai demonstrated it could speed the performance of a sample user click-path by up to 150% in the US and up to 350% globally. A common software application response test procedure is to define a specific user click-path, which is a set of mouse clicks through the application to execute common tasks, like looking up a patient record, while measuring how quickly the application responds at each step.  This test was repeatedly performed from different locations around the globe in order to estimate an average of the overall global experience.  

After participating in the Akamai upgrade, Derrick Berger, co-owner and office manager of Brazosport Urology, Lake Jackson, TX, said: "Performance has improved 50-75 percent overall. Screens refresh quicker than before, especially the appointment scheduler. Patient demographic data populates almost instantly. It really makes us efficient when we are on the phone – either adding a new patient to the schedule, looking up an existing patient or checking an account balance. There is not even the slightest delay in looking up information on a patient, which means a quicker response time to our patients and better patient service. In a small office like ours, where every second counts, this level of speed and accessibility is critical."

"One of the most critical transformations sweeping healthcare is the move to more efficient management of processes and data.  Enabling physicians to access Internet-based systems that are more powerful, more frequently updated, and more easily secured is critical to cutting the cost of healthcare," said Willie Tejada, Vice President, Application and Site Acceleration, Akamai Technologies. "By investing in Akamai's Web Application Accelerator, AdvancedMD is able to provide a consistent, high performance user experience to clinicians and billing service companies across the country and around the globe more cost-effectively, without investing in thousands of servers of their own."

"We are pleased with the results our customers are experiencing with this upgrade," said Sheridan Richey, Vice President of Engineering, AdvancedMD. "We continue to make significant financial investments to upgrade our architecture and infrastructure to improve the responsiveness and scalability of our application. It's a three-point effort, including the browser, transmission over the Internet and within our own data center. Traditionally, software companies thought little could be done to improve transmission speed over the Internet. We now know that is not true. While actual results are dependent on the individual network, we are seeing dramatic and consistent improvements in lower bandwidth utilization and overall round-trip response times between the customer's computer and our data center."

AdvancedMD Resources:

• View the video of AdvancedMD web-based performance.
• Read the performance metrics on AdvancedMD web-based medical software.
• Read the AdvancedMD case study featuring a physician practice.
• Learn about web-based medical office software.
• Learn about practice management and EHR software for private practices.
• Learn about billing software (www.advancedbiller.com) for medical billing services.

Akamai Resources:

• Read the Akamai case study featuring AdvancedMD.
• Akamai backgrounder
• Learn about Akamai and AdvancedMD performance testing results.

The Akamai Difference

Akamai® provides market-leading managed services for powering video, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai's services have been adopted by the world's most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamai's global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.

About AdvancedMD Software

AdvancedMD provides a market leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) electronic health record (EHR) and practice management (PM) software platform delivered to over 10,000 providers and 300 medical billing service providers nationwide. As a complete Medical Practice Optimization solution, the product combines the clinical with the financial to improve workflow and revenue capture. The AdvancedMD solution includes a certified EHR, patient portal, scheduling, electronic eligibility verification, electronic prescribing, and mobile access capabilities for the practice, and sophisticated, efficient claims processing, denial tracking and revenue management for the billing professional. Processing more than 1M claims per month through its clearinghouse, the company is able to identify payer rule changes quickly and continuously adjust the software to reflect those changes, yielding first-pass claim acceptance rates of 95 percent or better, compared to the national average of 70 percent. For more information, please visit www.advancedmd.com.

Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai's management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any attempts to intentionally disrupt our services or network by hackers or others, changes in AdvancedMD technology or to Akamai's technology such that they are no longer inter-operable, failure of our services to operate as expected, unexpected termination of Akamai's relationship with AdvancedMD, a failure of Akamai's network infrastructure, and other factors that are discussed in Akamai's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.

SOURCE AdvancedMD Software, Inc.