The Advisory Board Company, a research, technology and consulting firm, has acquired Clinovations, an 80-employee, health IT company, just a half mile away.

Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

Clinovations offers strategic, clinical and health IT advisory and management consulting services aimed at helping healthcare organizations derive all the value they can from their IT investments.

Clinovations will join the Advisory Board's Southwind division to form Advisory Board Consulting and Management. The Advisory Board acquired Southwind five years ago.

Southwind works with physician practices to boost performance and with health systems to improve hospital-physician alignment. Southwind has grown by leaps since it joined The Advisory Board. It went from 28 clients five years ago, to serving more than 200 organizations. It has 180 employees.

One of the benefits of the deal, Clinovations CEO Trenor Williams, MD, told Healthcare IT News, is "the ability for us to add to the solution that The Advisory Board has. Our ability to integrate with their solution to provide them with clinical and operational expertise and layer in our organization's technology, we think we can add amazing value and impact around the country," he said.

It also opens up new market opportunities for Clinovations. The Advisory Board does business with more than 70 percent of the hospitals across the country.

"Clinovations adds an essential element," which is how do we optimize the performance of these $100 million investments of IT," Williams said.

As he sees it, there is synchronicity in joining Southwind and Clininovations.

"There's a natural connection to just about everything we do," Williams said.

"The opportunity that we think is going to apply in about half the cases is to offer services in combination," said John Deane, Southwind founder and President, Consulting and Management, at The Advisory Board, "We weren't able to go to a health system with an offering that said, 'We're going to optimize Epic, Cerner or athena in your health system." By the same token, he added, Clinovations now has the opportunity to offer a broader line of services.

Going back to 2009, Southwind joined The Advisory Board Company with about 28 clients in 12 states. Today, we're 180 employees serving more than 300 clients in 49 states.

Last year Clinovations had 46 clients in 31 states. The company employs 80 people, with about 30 percent of them physicians.