For a public company, Athenahealth has kept a fairly low profile. But that’s been changing over the past year—and the trend continues today.

The Watertown, MA-based health IT company (NASDAQ: ATHN) says it is acquiring Proxsys, a care coordination and admitting services firm based in Alabama. The price is $28 million in cash upfront plus up to $8 million in potential milestone payments. The deal is expected to close later this quarter.

Xconomy profiled Athenahealth in 2010 as the firm was ramping up efforts to raise its profile among doctors—the target audience for its Internet cloud-enabled billing and electronic health records services. Now the company plans to integrate Proxsys’s healthcare services such as referral management, patient registration, and care coordination (between doctors and hospitals) into Athena’s service platform, with the goal of improving efficiency and providing better control of patient care for hospitals and healthcare providers. (For more on how this works, check out this company blog post.)

“We have a vision for how health care information exchange ought to work, and Proxsys represents a critical element of achieving that vision,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and chairman of Athenahealth (and former President George W.’s first cousin), in a statement. “This service will be the latest piece of the national health information backbone we have been steadily constructing.”

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New England biotechs and IT startups don’t seem to indicate a summer slowdown. They’ve been inking some pretty massive financing deals this week, as well as an acquisition or two.

—Cambridge, MA-based drug developer Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO) raised $100 million, selling 5.75 million shares of stock at $17.50 apiece in an underwritten public offering. Aveo had $233 million in cash and investments as of March 31 and enough cash to operate through 2012, according to federal documents.

—Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) acquired Zurich-based embedded speech software firm SVOX, for 87 million Euros (about U.S. $125 million), in a mix of upfront cash and cash and stock over the next two years.

—Westford, MA-based Aylus Networks raised $16 million to put toward its software for improving video communications on mobile phones. The deal was led by London-based m8 Capital, with participation from previous Aylus investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

—Performable, a Cambridge-based marketing automation startup, was acquired by Cambridge-based HubSpot for an undisclosed sum. Performable’s 18 staffers will join HubSpot, a marketing tech company with more than 260 employees now, at its Kendall Square digs, with Performable founder David Cancel becoming HubSpot’s chief product officer.

–1366 Technologies, a Lexington, MA-based developer of silicon wafer technology for solar cells, said that it received a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy for a $150 million loan guarantee.

—Boston-based ad tech startup OwnerIQ nabbed a $7 million investment from its existing backers, Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, Kepha Partners, and … Next Page »

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Boston-based Kyruus, a health-IT startup whose name I cannot spell, said today it has raised a $5.5 million Series A round led by Highland Capital Partners, Venrock, and Gerson Lehrman Group. Angel investors Jonathan Bush, Ed Park, John Goldsmith, and James Golden also participated in the financing. Kyruus has developed a software platform that includes professional profiles of doctors and “big data” analytics. The software provides what Kyruus calls “a unified view of the physician” that can be searched and analyzed by healthcare deliverers, government workers, and payers. The company started in 2010 and is led by co-founders Graham Gardner and Julie Yoo (both from Generation Health). Gardner told Forbes that the goal is to become “the Bloomberg or ITA Software of physician information.” Xconomy first wrote about Kyruus back in January.

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Bring an open mind and an extra business card or two. That’s what I’m planning to do as I gear up for today’s Xconony Xchange: HHS CTO Todd Park and Friends on the Future of Health IT. Xconomy is fortunate that the event is sold out, and there’s little doubt in my mind that the big reason for the sell-out is the terrific speakers we have lined up (not to mention the great venue at Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA).

For starters, we’re pumped to have Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health Human Services, back here in the Hub to be our keynote speaker. And he has an invaluable insider’s perspective on the multibillion-dollar effort afoot to digitize patient health records in this country. Park brings a unique perspective to the hot-button topic of the role of government in healthcare. He and Jonathan Bush co-founded Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) in 1998 after learning that there was a great need for a Web-enabled service to help doctors manage their billing—and actually get reimbursed by insurance companies for taking care of patients.

Now Park, having taken his big job at HHS in August 2009, is applying what he learned as an entrepreneur at a great big government agency. If you’re a health IT executive who’s always dreamed of going to Washington as an agent of change, Park’s living that sort of dream (though I’m guessing that the cutthroat politics in the capital can be a real nightmare sometimes). For example, Park has taken the lead in efforts to make data such as details on health insurers more transparent and searchable online for the public.

While Park is going to spur our minds into motion with his opening remarks, things will start getting more interactive when he joins our other stellar speakers on a panel about the future of health IT. Dana Callow, founder and general managing partner of Boston Millennia Partners, is moderating the panel. The panel also features Bob Higgins, co-founder and general partner at Highland Capital Partners, and Rob Seliger, a general manager at the Microsoft Health Solutions Group and a founder and former CEO of Sentillion. All the panelists have experience building health IT companies from the ground up and providing successful exits for investors—Park at Athenahealth (2007 initial public offering), Higgins at Generation Health (majority acquired by CVS Caremark in 2009), and Seliger at Sentillion (sold to Microsoft, also in 2009).

I also took the liberty of looking at who has registered for this event. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but I think you’ll find that there will be an awesome representation of the most exciting new health IT startups, corporate venture investors (think Internet giants with deep pockets), traditional VCs, health IT executives, and members of the healthcare provider community in the Boston area. Doors open for the event at around 4:15 pm today, and I’m planning on getting there as early as I can to catch up with as many people as possible before we get the program started at around 5 pm. See you there!

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A few weeks ago, we hosted an Xconomy Xchange evening featuring Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), and Girish Navani, his counterpart at Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks. With Pam McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants, wielding a gavel to moderate, the two competitors discussed and debated the future of health IT. You can read our summary of the Faceoff on the Future of Healthcare IT here. Now we’ve got some video.

The event took place on Sept. 29 at WilmerHale’s offices in downtown Boston, overlooking Boston harbor. Our partners at Schwartz Communications were able to lure Bush, McNamara, and a few attendees away from the view to get their takes on the subject on camera. It was a small but diverse group that (besides Bush and McNamara) included Jeff Livingstone, industry strategist for healthcare and life science at Akamai, Caleb Stowell, a medical student at Harvard Medical School, and myself.

This video, introduced by Schwartz senior vice president Helen Shik of the firm’s healthcare practice, is especially nice because it is easily navigable and allows you to select just the speakers you want to hear—skipping non-experts like me if you so choose. Thanks to the Schwartz video team for putting it together. I hope you enjoy it.

Some of my favorite takes:

—Livingstone on how the healthcare industry has been late to the cloud.

—McNamara on how technology is enabling more focus on improving the patient experience, versus its original implementation almost as an afterthought to improve back office efficiency.

—Med student Stowell on why so many doctors are slow to adopt health IT technology—and why students don’t have that problem.

—Jonathan Bush on how successful adoption of new technology comes down to one thing: “cash.”

Again, you can view the whole video here (scroll down a bit on the page after following the link).

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It was a lighter life sciences news week, but we did see a new biotech company surface, while a major pharma continued its pursuit of a local biotech giant.

—French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis made another move in its quest to acquire Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), with a $18.5 billion hostile takeover bid. It was the same price—$69 per share—as an earlier offer from Sanofi that the Genzyme’s board had unanimously rejected.

—Biotech startup ModeRNA Therapeutics, launched out of Cambridge, MA-based Flagship VentureLabs, announced that it has developed technology that uses synthetic RNA to reprogram adult stem cells to function like embryonic stem cells, while avoiding detection by cells’ anti-viral defense systems. ModeRNA, whose technology comes out of Children’s Hospital Boston, has also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Flagship and another unnamed investor.

—Luke introduced readers to some of the cancer-fighting biotech companies we’ll be featuring in our “Xconomy Forum: Boston’s War on Cancer” event later this month. Going beyond chemotherapy and other targeted treatments, speakers will cover how RNA interference, epigenetics, and molecular diagnostics are playing their part. The event will also feature a panel on the process of garnering FDA approval for cancer drugs, moderated by our life sciences columnist Sylvia Pagán Westphal.

—In case you missed it, Ryan wrote a recap of the inaugural Xconomy Xchange, featuring Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) and Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani. Cambridge Consultants president Pam McNamara moderated as the two executives dished on their firms’ approach to electronic medical records, their respective business models, and what to make of the government’s incentives for physicians to adopt the technology.

—Speaking of health IT, Boston-based mobile app company FitnessKeeper added some features to its run-tracking app to simulate the group workout class experience, says CEO Jason Jacobs. The RunKeeper app is now integrating race training plans designed by running experts and tools for searching for upcoming events and connecting with other RunKeeper users who are planning to run the same race.

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It was an experiment. Put two rivals in the health IT game—Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN), and Girish Navani, CEO of Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks—on the same stage to talk frankly about the future of their industry. Pam McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants, showed up to moderate with a wooden gavel, if that’s any indication of the kind of exchange she expected.

So did the experiment, which was our inaugural “Xconomy Xchange,” work? If shedding real light on a key industry without (too much) verbal bloodshed is any measure, then the answer’s a decided yes. Bush and Navani lead companies with profoundly different approaches to enabling the expanded use of electronic health records in the U.S. The CEOs did an admirable job of explaining those differences, with great questions from McNamara and only a little help from her gavel.

From the outset, it was easy to see how Bush and Navani have grown their companies into enterprises with more than $100 million in annual revenue and hundreds of employees in the Bay State. They both showed themselves to be thoughtful leaders—and skillful debaters when the discussion turned to what makes their companies stand out from others.

What follows are some of the highlights from the Xchange, which was hosted in the Boston offices of the law firm WilmerHale. Keep your eyes peeled for Bush’s and Navani’s comments on the U.S. government’s recently heightened role in their industry, as it is about the only issue on which they appeared to come close to seeing eye-to-eye.

From left: Girish Navani, Pam McNamara, and Jonathan Bush.

On Getting Paid

Athenahealth makes most of its money by taking a small cut of revenues from doctor’s offices that use its software—rather than charging a fee to use the software or some other billing scheme. EClinicalWorks charges doctors a relatively low monthly subscription fee, set at $250 per doctor, for use of its electronic health records software.

“We are a cloud-based service. We give away the software, and we change it eight times a year,” Bush said. “The reason for that is partly because we can move through the innovation curve faster. As a new entrant, we had to be able to bust through all the different features that the established software companies had. More importantly, you have to have a totally different set of economics.”

For doctors paying $250 per month for its software, Navani said, “it’s something that you’re not going to … Next Page »

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There are literally billions of dollars at stake in this contest: Across the U.S., electronic health records (EHR) vendors are hustling to get physicians to buy their products as the federal government forges ahead with a multibillion-dollar effort to increase usage of the records.

The race was ignited by the February 2009 passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which provides $19.2 billion to fund electronic health records adoption in the U.S.. Competition has been fierce, with many software providers stepping in to get a piece of the action. Because the vast majority of the country’s doctors are still using paper records, there’s a large market for these electronic health record outfits to tap. In this intensely competitive market, Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) and Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks have been aggressively making the case for their respective health record systems. They represent the state’s two leading firms in the race to gain EHR customers.

Now, Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and eClinicalWorks chief executive Girish Navani are meeting at the next Xconomy Xchange in Boston for an intimate, up close and personal chat about their companies’ efforts to gain new customers during this unprecedented time of change in their industry. This unique event is taking place on September 29 at WilmerHale in downtown Boston (register here for one of the remaining tickets). Pamela McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants and a healthcare innovator in her own right, has taken up the task of moderating what is likely to be a colorful exchange between two health IT chiefs who aren’t afraid to speak their minds.

Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks are great examples of the rapid growth in the health IT sector, particularly in the electronic health records business. Athenahealth doubled the number of medical providers who use its Web-based electronic health records in a year, from 1,046 at the end of June 2009 to 2,256 at the end of this past June, according to the company. Meanwhile, eClinicalWorks says that it now has more than 40,000 providers who use its software. Both companies also provide revenue management software for doctor’s offices, so they compete in multiple categories in the healthcare software market. In fact, healthcare reform is expected to bring major changes to the ways some doctors get paid, from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance models, creating opportunities for Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks to further expand their revenue management businesses.

Widespread adoption of electronic health records in doctors’ offices is presumably a step toward democratizing the healthcare system in a way that gives patients greater control of their health information—and, ideally, their actual care. We’ll find out where Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks see themselves playing a role in improving the portability of electronic health data for the benefit of patients as well as doctors—and where they see the biggest future payoffs, not just for their own companies, but for consumers. McNamara, whose Cambridge Consultants has done extensive work in health product development, brings an expert perspective that will help guide this sure-to-be-fascinating discussion.

All three of these experts will be around for a networking reception after the Xchange.

So please secure your tickets to this unique event and networking opportunity here—they’re going fast. We look forward to seeing you on Sep. 29.

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It’s a classic principle in economics: markets don’t work very well when there’s no price transparency. If the airlines refused to quote you a price for a transcontinental ticket and then sent you a bill for an unpredictable amount six months after your flight, you probably wouldn’t fly much. But this is exactly how most consumers experience the U.S. medical care payment system. Under the complex web of reimbursement rates negotiated in secret between providers and insurers, insured patients are usually charged directly only for their premiums, deductibles, and copayments, and have no way to compare the actual costs of treatments from different providers, even if they want to.

San Francisco startup Castlight Health, true to its name, wants to cast a light on the opaque, shadowy world of medical costs. If you give consumers the tools to make more informed decisions about where to get care, argues Castlight founder and CEO Giovanni Colella, they’ll end up saving themselves, their employers, and their employers’ health plans serious money.

“We are asking people to shop, but providing them with an experience where there is no price,” says Colella. “We figured that if we can figure out what the prices are, we can provide a portal, a Travelocity for healthcare, that allows us to display prices online and really create a shopping experience for medical care.”

Figuring out those prices is the tricky part. Since many healthcare providers and insurers won’t or can’t disclose their rates, Castlight has to reconstruct them through a laborious process of what Colella calls “reverse engineering”—analyzing data from millions of explanation-of-benefits forms sent by insurers to employees at the companies that use Castlight’s services. Exactly how that works is part of the startup’s secret sauce, but the result is a personalized portal where employees can gauge their true out-of-pocket medical costs, compare what they paid to averages for their region, and find opportunities to save.

At a time when health-insurance reforms are making everyone more price-sensitive—both by forcing consumers to share more of the costs of their care, and by capping the premiums insurers can charge—Castlight’s vision is one that seems to intrigue employers mightily, not to mention investors. Colella says that Castlight, which already serves big companies like Safeway, is meeting with eight new potential customers, mostly big employers around the U.S., every day.

And the two-year-old startup announced last week that it had closed a massive $60 million Series C venture financing round, from a group that included new investors Morgan Stanley, U.S. Venture Partners, the Wellcome Trust, and the Cleveland Clinic, as well as previous investors Maverick Capital, Oak Investment Partners, and Venrock. In two previous rounds of financing, the company had raised only $20 million; the huge up round was a signpost of the widespread investor interest in the company, as well as a “very high” valuation that left some investors “saying they wished they’d come in 6 months ago,” in Colella’s words.

Venrock was one of the firms that got in early. In fact, Colella says he considers Venrock partner Bryan Roberts (an Xconomist) to be one of the company’s co-founders, along with himself and Todd Park, the Athenahealth co-founder who was tapped last year to be chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Neither Colella nor Roberts claims that there’s anything original about Castlight’s vision. Indeed, healthcare analysts have been bemoaning the lack of price transparency for decades, and there is a minor movement underway in places like New Hampshire to take the wraps off the fees charged by providers for various procedures.

But no one before Castlight, formerly known as Ventana Health Services, has been ambitious (or foolhardy) enough to go after cost data on a massive scale, with the goal of exposing the huge variations in the prices that providers charge for common procedures. The company has discovered, for example, that some gastroenterologists in the San Francisco Bay Area charge as little as $1,500 for a colonoscopy, while others charge as much as … Next Page »

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News surrounding Genzyme’s ongoing battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn cropped up this week, alongside headlines from other big biotechs and in-depth profiles on newer life sciences names in the New England area.

—Luke caught up with the chief scientist and the co-founder of Cambridge, MA-based Proteostasis Therapeutics, which was built around research from the Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Northwestern University. The company, which launched with a massive $45 million venture capital round in 2008, is out to make drugs that alter the protein pathways that break down as people age, contributing to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s.

—Ryan took a look at Ligon Discovery, a spinoff of MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute that develops small-molecule technology that could have applications in identifying potential disease proteins and finding drugs to home in on those targets.

—Link Medicine, a Cambridge developer of drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases, exceeded its original expectations for its Series C round of funding by $5 million, the company’s CEO told Ryan. A third closing of the Series C, at $20 million, brought the round’s total to $45 million, money that will go to testing Link’s drug for treating mild Alzheimer’s, which went into its first human clinical trial in November 2009.

—Activist investor Carl Icahn continued his campaign for greater influence on the board of Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), filing a proxy statement with the SEC in which he called the drugmaker’s manufacturing system “broken,” and advised shareholders not to reelect chairman and CEO Henri Termeer to the board. Icahn, who controls 4.9 percent of Genzyme’s common stock, is vying to get himself and three associates on the board, which has 10 seats up for reelection in mid June. On Thursday, the Genzyme board of directors also announced plans for a $2 billion stock repurchase aimed at increasing shareholder value

—I profiled Beverly, MA-based Eliza, a company that employs intelligent speech-recognition technology in a system of automated phone calls that communicate to patients about their healthcare, on behalf of insurers, employers, and prescription benefit managers. The company has made more than 400 million phone calls in ten years, encouraging patients to do everything from lose weight to schedule preventative screenings.

—Cambridge’s Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) revised a 2007 agreement with Merck & Co, giving the pharma giant exclusive license to develop, produce, and sell Ariad’s cancer drug, ridaforolimus—activities that Merck (NYSE: MRK) will also cover the costs of. Initially, the two companies were sharing the marketing rights and the responsibilities of funding the development of the drug, which is designed to treat certain soft tissue and bone sarcomas. Ariad nabbed $69 million for the revised deal, which comes on top of … Next Page »

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Athenahealth is a high-flier in the Boston business community, led by the outspoken and forceful Jonathan Bush. Bush, however, openly admits that his Watertown, MA-based company (NASDAQ:ATHN) is relatively unknown outside of local business and technology circles—including among most U.S. physicians. Athena has been ramping up efforts to raise its profile among doctors, the target audience for its Internet-enabled billing and electronic health records services. Yet the company has been criticized for the relatively high price of the push.

Athena’s stock price dropped more than 18 percent after it disclosed on April 29 that its first-quarter profits slid 80 percent, from $1.5 million in the first three months of 2009 to $300,000 in the same quarter of this year. Despite a 33 percent jump in revenue during the first quarter, the company said, profits were down partially because of its increased spending on efforts to gain more customers. Some analysts on Wall Street have slammed the firm’s spending, but company officials are forging ahead with the strategy despite the criticism.

About 16,400 physicians currently use Athena’s Internet software and services to manage their billing, and a goal of the company’s marketing is to grow its customer base to 100,000 doctors. To reach that target number, Athena is spending money on measures to get doctors to warm up to the firm’s relatively new concept of charging customers at a rate that fluctuates depending on how well its billing system performs for them. The company gets a cut of its customers’ revenue, based in part on how much the firm collects from health insurance companies, rather than making most of its money from software sales and licensing fees, as some its competitors do. Athena is also making the case that its software, which is delivered over the Internet, reduces doctors’ need to invest in servers to handle the workloads and operation of its technology.

Nevertheless, Athena appears to be fighting against at least a few currents in healthcare. Doctors are notoriously hesitant to adopt new technologies like Athena’s. Also, the company will have trouble matching the marketing might of its larger competitors such as GE Healthcare, Allscripts-Misys Healthcare, and Siemens Medical Solutions. Allscripts, for example, has about 10 times as many physician customers as Athena and more salespeople beating the pavement to grow that user base further still, says George Hill, an analyst for Leerink Swann, a Boston-based investment bank and equities research firm.

“The problem here is that Athena now has to increase its … Next Page »

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MedAptus, a Boston-based provider of billing software for medical practices and hospitals, reports it has raised $6 million in a financing. The financing, led by previous investor Boston Millennia Partners, is intend to expand MedAptus’s “Intelligent Charge Capture” software business. MedAptus says that one feature of its software is to enhance organizations’ investments in electronic medical records. The electronic records have become a hot topic since President Barack Obama allocated $19 billion for EMRs in his $787 billion federal stimulus package passed by Congress in February. (Here’s a recent interview I did on the topic with Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush.)

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It was nice to see a little venture activity among New England’s biotechs this past week, but overall things have been relatively quiet.

—Regulus Therapeutics, a Carlsbad, CA-based spinoff of Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY), took a step toward greater independence with $20 million in Series A financing from Alnylam and Carlsbad’s Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ISIS), which joined with Alnylam to form Regulus in 2007. Regulus, which is working to develop drugs based on the relatively new field of microRNA, also changed its corporate status from an LLC to a C-corporation to pave the way for contributions from outside investors down the road.

—Acusphere (OTC:ACUS) of Watertown, MA, revealed plans to move its headquarters from there to Tewksbury, MA, and to cut 40 jobs, representing about two-thirds of its staff. Acusphere is seeking FDA approval cardiac imaging agent, perflubutane polymer microspheres (Imagify).

—Venrock Associates of Cambridge, MA; New York; Palo Alto, CA; and Israel launched Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners with a $194 million fund to invest in public and late-stage private healthcare companies.

—Ryan caught a glimpse of a nascent Boston-area biotech called Novophage that’s out to turn bacteria-infecting viruses into a new weapon in the rapidly escalating battle against antibiotic-resistant microbes like MRSA. The startup, whose scientific founders include MIT’s Bob Langer and Gregory Stephanopoulos, Boston University’s James Collins, and … Next Page »

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Most doctors in the U.S. have never heard of Athenahealth, the Watertown, MA-based firm offering Web-based software for managing billing, electronic medical records (EMRs), and other functions in physician practices. But the federal government plans to invest $19 billion to make funds available for doctors to switch from the usual paper-based systems to electronic medical records, giving them a new reason to learn more about Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) and its offerings. I caught up last week with Jonathan Bush, the outspoken CEO of Athenahealth, to get the lowdown on how the company is seizing this multibillion-dollar opportunity.

Bush, the first cousin of former President George W. Bush, has his doubts about the program. For one thing, the $19 billion isn’t a lot of money for its ambitious purpose, and for another he says that he wants to know what specific standards doctors will be held to in their use of federally subsidized electronic medical records. The $19 billion is part of the broader, $787 billion stimulus package passed in Congress last month. Some of the details such as a murky requirement that doctors will have to show “meaningful use” of electronic records to get the federal dollars have yet to be fully explained. Athenahealth is hoping that the requirement means doctors will have to actually use the electronic records and integrate them into their practices, playing into the company’s strengths in providing software and online services that touch multiple aspects of medical practices.

In any case, doctors are going to get a bigger dose of Athenahealth and its chief executive. The firm revealed during its earnings call last month that it plans to increase its investment in sales and marketing this year. And here’s a link to Bush’s colorful TV appearance two weeks ago on CNBC.

The interview below captures Bush’s thoughts about the $19 billion that the government plans to inject into his industry and its likely impact on Athenahealth. (And if you can’t tell from the interview, Bush hints that he has some obvious philosophical differences with the stimulus package.)

Xconomy: Do you think the government’s spending on EMRs will be effective?

Bush: Obviously, the standards are still up in air … Next Page »

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Late last January, on the heels of BG Medicine and Elixir Pharmaceuticals pulling their planned initial public offerings, I moderated a panel at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium examining the IPO climate and separating myth from reality (IPOs, for instance, are NOT exit events).

The panel was offered by the MIT Enterprise Forum. My knowledgeable, and entertaining guests, included Jonathan Bush, Jr., chairman and CEO of Athenahealth; Gail Goodman, president and CEO of Constant Contact; Jonathan “Jono” Goldstein, managing director of TA Associates; and Bruce Evans, managing partner of Summit Partners. Both Athenahealth and Constant Contact made their public market debuts last fall.

We talked IPO, we talked SPO, we talked lockups, and we talked growth private equity. There were tales of road-show perks—private jets, fine scotch, and black sedans—and the question of who really pays for them. And, of course, we heard about startup and growth travails, from both the entrepreneur and the investor sides. I wrote about one aspect of the evening shortly thereafter, when I outlined Bush’s five things to know about going public in, IPO Advice from the President’s Cousin—Strike That—IPO Advice From a CEO to Whom the President is Related.

But now the whole show is available on the MIT Enterprise Forum site, along with other video podcasts of events the group has put on. Check it out. Take these veterans’ advice to heart. And when the IPO market does turn around, may you be ready.

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I’m too bummed about the Super Bowl to come up with a snappy lede for today’s roundup. Here are last week’s deals:

—Coal gasification firm GreatPoint Energy of Cambridge, MA, forged a long-term agreement with St. Louis-based Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) to build plants close to the company’s mines in Montana and Wyoming.

—Visible Measures closed a $13.5 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Park, CA’s Mohr Davidow Ventures and Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst. The Boston-based firm last week unveiled its “VisibleSuite” audience measurement system at the Demo 08 conference.

—Inverness Medical Innovations (AMEX: IMA) of Waltham, MA, inked a deal to purchase Marietta, GA’s Matria Healthcare (NASDAQ: MATR) for some $1.18 billion in cash, stock, and the assumption of debt. Inverness investors didn’t seem to like the deal; the company’s stock fell 8 percent on news of the acquisition, the latest in a long string of buys for Inverness.

—Facebook shopping-engine maker StyleFeeder of Cambridge, MA, raised $2 million in Series A financing from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital; the same two firms provided the startup’s $1 million seed round last year.

—Virtual Iron Software of Lowell, MA, raised $20 million in equity capital from Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, and SAP Ventures, bringing the virtualization firm’s total venture financing to $65 million.

—Boston-based MocoSpace, a provider of cell phone-based social networking, closed a $4 million second-round financing from General Catalyst, Pilot Group, former eBay executive Michael Dearing, and others.

—Second Rotation announced it had completed a $4.4 million initial financing round led by Venrock and including the participation of angel investors Austin Ligon, Ashton Peery, and Henry Vogel. The Waltham, MA-based startup buys consumers’ unwanted electronics and sells them online.

—Yet another virtualization firm, AutoVirt of Nashua, NH, closed a $4 million Series A funding round. Waltham, MA-based Kepha Partners and Boston-based Sigma Partner participated in the deal.

—Watertown, MA’s Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) pulled its planned secondary stock offering, citing poor market conditions. The news came on the same day that Bob posted about Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, Jr.’s pointed advice for entrepreneurs contemplating an IPO.

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Talk about timing. On the very day we post the IPO advice of Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, Jr.—in an article that happens to mention the current tough economic climate for IPOs—Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) announces it is shelving its plans for a secondary public offering. And, you guessed it, the company is citing the current tough economic climate.

Athenahealth announced its SPO, under which the company and selling shareholders that included Oak Investment Partners and Cardinal Partners planned to offer just over 3 million common shares, back in early January. But on the heels of recent decisions by both BG Medicine and Elixir Pharmaceuticals to postpone their IPOs, it is hardly a surprise to see the economic foul weather extending into the secondary market.

Be sure to check out Bush’s IPO pearls of wisdom—you’ll see what I mean when I say I guess he won’t be getting out of his lockup early, and he won’t be taking any cool jet rides with investment bankers and their “really nice scotch” anytime soon. In late afternoon trading, though, Athenahealth’s stock was on a nice little ride of its own, up $1.67, or just over 5 percent, at $33.07.

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It’s shaping up to be a bleak year for IPOs. Last Thursday, BG Medicine pulled its initial public offering, citing market conditions. The week before that, Elixir Pharmaceuticals also put its IPO plans on ice. But the idea of IPOs was alive and well last Thursday night, when I had the pleasure of moderating a great discussion—Are You Ready for IPO?—before some 300 guests at MIT’s Kresge auditorium and who knows how many others who watched on a special TV broadcast at 45 locations worldwide.

The panel was put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum. And I had four fantastic, eloquent, insightful, and humorous guests: Jonathan Bush, Jr., chairman and CEO of Athenahealth; Gail Goodman, president and CEO of Constant Contact; Jonathan “Jono” Goldstein, managing director of TA Associates; and Bruce Evans, managing partner of Summit Partners. Both Athenahealth and Constant Contact are roughly 10 years old and successfully went public last fall.

We dissected the current climate for IPOs (bleak no matter how you slice it), the spectrum of investors—from angels, to early and mid-stage VCs, to growth private equity folks like Goldstein and Evans (who typically invest in established, profitable companies looking to move to the next level), to buyout artists who use as much debt as possible to purchase companies that typically are not growing very fast. Along the way, we heard some riveting tales from Bush and Goodman about what it was actually like to go on the IPO road show, the wheeling and dealing with investment bankers, the private jets and black sedans, lock-up periods, and a lot more. Somewhere near the end of our discussion, Bush whipped out some notes he had taken and delighted the crowd dispensing some key advice to entrepreneurs who might one day seek their own IPO.

Now, to put his comments in perspective, it’s important to know that Bush is anything but demure. Like when I said: “People often ask you how you are related to the President, and I’m told that’s not the right question: How is the President related to you?

And he said: “Yeah, you’re goddamn right. The President is my cousin, and he lobbied hard for the role and succeeded in the end. We took him. Sometimes we think about putting him back.”

I figured pearls of wisdom from such a character were too good to pass up, so I snatched his notes and convinced the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Greg Wymer to let me listen to a private video feed of the broadcast so I could get things exactly right. The result is a slight hodgepodge and condensation of what he wrote and what he said at various times during the event.

It all started when we were talking about investment bankers—and that seems to have set him off:

“The investment bankers are really charming and incredibly good negotiators…they’re very savvy, very svelte kind of smooth talkers, and you can see a lot of use for that after you’ve been, you know, kind of filleted by them. I wish that somebody, either our lawyer, or…somebody had given me a list. Can I give you the list?”

What moderator would say no?

1) On lockup (the period after a company goes public when key insiders can’t sell their stock). “There’s a lockup and they say, ‘It’s always got to be 180 days. It’s just what’s done.’ Well it absolutely does not have to be 180 days. It … Next Page »

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Our previous post (see below) was about Waltham, MA-based BG Medicine pulling its planned initial public offering. It was bad news, but it comes at an interesting time—I am a couple hours from leaving the Xconomy offices to host a panel in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium entitled, “Are You Ready For IPO?”

The panel is being put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum, in collaboration with the NASDAQ Educational Foundation. Among other things, it is designed to examine in detail what an IPO really means, how to plan for it, how the current economic environment affects that strategy, and what alternatives there might be for up-and-coming firms.

I’ll be speaking with some absolutely great guests who know this subject cold. They include two CEOs who successfully took their companies public last year: Jonathan Bush, chairman and CEO of Athenahealth, and Gail Goodman, president and CEO of Constant Contact. Also on hand will be two growth private equity leaders who come at the IPO process (and the alternatives) from the investment side of the ledger: Jonathan Goldstein, managing director of TA Associates, and Bruce Evans, managing partner of Summit Partners.

The panel starts at 7 pm, and there’s a reception beforehand. You can find more details here. Hope to see you there!

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