These days, athena is evolving an aggressive marketing play (“Unbreak Healthcare”) to not only highlight the fragmented bits of healthcare but to offer a vision for what “unbroken” healthcare looks like. They’re doing this through a slightly changed tone and launched athenaInsight last month to help drive change through data.
Bush visited the Health 2.0 digital health conference in Santa Clara, California last week where he explained his vision for Health 3.0 at an athenahealth-sponsored talk show hosted by Dr. Zubin Damania aka ZDoggMD. Healthcare Dive sat down with Bush who touched on topics such as digital health ventures, collaborations across the industry, and where consumer-driven technology may actually impact clinical care. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Healthcare Dive: Can you explain Health 3.0?
athenahealth CEO & President Jonathan Bush: Paper to computer, computer to network. It’s the notion of healthcare on the internet. The idea of standalone computers running enterprise software is a freaking dinosaur concept. We need something that’s internet native and has everybody on one platform. From a societal public health perspective, it’s obviously what was meant when Congress passed the HITECH Act. They thought they were passing the Healthcare Internet Act and what they got was thousands and thousands and thousands of isolated installations of software from the ’80s and ’90s.
About half or two-thirds of everything we do in the doctor’s office could actually be done digitally. If we did that, we could shop for care not just amongst the specialists, shrinks and radiologists in a town but anywhere in the country. What has been a largely monopolized local market for care could become a much more liquid, more powerful national market for care from patients’ point of view. From the provider’s point of view, their opportunity to grow would no longer be constrained by their geography but could grow into the rest of the country. For a tertiary, quadiary academic medical center that is basically bathing with a wire brush in shame for what they’ve done to their prices – beating up the local health plans to get their rates up – the idea that you can actually grow outside of your geography is inspiring.
