Three questions for athena's Jonathan Bush
Athenahealth has been in the headlines in recent months due to the company’s efforts to champion interoperability through the CommonWell Health Alliance, reports of its customers’ high rate of successful Meaningful Use attestation and expansion into the ambulatory EHR market.
Clinical Innovation + Technology posed three questions to athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush.
Q: How is athenahealth working toward the national goal of interoperability?
JB: athenahealth has been championing interoperability and an overall industry push toward openness for some time and, for the first time, it feels like we’re not alone. The industry is at a tipping point—there’s an overall consensus that players of healthcare (hospitals, health systems, vendors and to a lesser extent providers) must be held accountable and make efforts not just to be interoperable but to actually interoperate.
Patients no longer receive care at a single place. In fact, many receive the majority of their care outside of the hospital setting. As such, it is imperative we adopt patient-centered information exchange; that is to say the patient’s health information should follow them to every care setting, no matter the EHR system in place. Our cloud-based platform model is based on the idea that it’s infinitely valuable to instantly share information across a network. We are committed to going a step further; we are making CommonWell services available to our entire client base of more than 62,000 healthcare providers nationwide. In partnership with our clients, athenahealth will work to bring as many patients as possible who are treated by our clients’ network onto CommonWell.
In addition to this, we are working on standards-based frameworks that enable information to be easily accessed from within the athenaClinicals EHR. This includes work with a variety of industry innovators and collaborators such as Geisinger Health System and SMART (Substitutable Medical Apps & Reusable Technology), a project funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program. Current examples of this work include:
- SMART Pediatric Growth Chart APP
- xG Health SolutionsTM’s EnrG|Rheum™
- SMART Cardiac Risk APP
Q: What other health IT trends do you see this year?
JB: Beyond interoperability, the evolution of population health. Meaningful execution will entail gaining insight into patient populations, translating that insight into workable knowledge for care teams and, ultimately, enable a new standard of connectedness. This will result in new ways of managing and delivering care. I believe the front leaders will be the ones to leverage a combination of software and knowledge and to continually work to make progress against this complex and crucial undertaking.
Q: What are athenahealth’s goals over the next couple of years?
JB: We’re to see continued growth as we’ve seen in years past, especially with the move into the in-patient space. We recently opened up an Austin office and will continue to see growth of our More Disruption Please Program.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.