The Electronic Health Records Association (EHRA) recently rolled out its EHR Developer Code of Conduct. As both a leading (and the most usable!), cloud-based EHR vendor, and an active member of the EHRA, athenahealth is pleased to see the Association’s code and will absolutely sign on.

But even before the EHRA’s roll-out event, we were getting the obvious question: What does the EHRA Code have to do with athenahealth’s own Health Information Industry Code of Conduct , introduced to the industry back in January?

The answer to that question is: plenty. And no, the two codes aren’t contradictory—they’re … Read more

When things go wrong in a hospital—on either the clinical or administrative front—we are often left wondering how a dedicated and thoughtful team of people could have jointly participated in the decisions and actions that led to the failures. Recent stories in the news may give us a clue.

Problems recently uncovered at the Internal Revenue Service are typical of those found in many organizations when a team of people become isolated and feel unsupported. The team might be doing a job that nobody else wants to do or is out of the mainstream, work often characterized by a large … Read more

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and having enough curiosity to get a cat into trouble, I’ve attended a lot of health care technology conferences. After a few, you start to see the same themes. At VentureBeat’s inaugural HealthBeat conference last month, I, once again, I saw the repetition: Big data, outcomes-focused innovation, wearable devices, electronic health record (EHR) adoption, and patient engagement tools.

During one of the best talks of the day, Dr. David Levin, CMIO of Cleveland Clinic, presented his thoughts on the direction medicine is headed, in the form of three ‘P’ words: Personalization, … Read more

Three months ago, when we officially welcomed our new colleagues from Epocrates to the athenahealth family, the Cloud Analytics team had one recurring thought: Cool, more data! And plenty of it, considering Epocrates is the most widely used medical mobile app by caregivers. Just as our claims and electronic health record (EHR) data accurately reflected this past winter’s early flu season, Epocrates’ drug and disease lookup records can illustrate the health care issues that physicians and their patients are facing today.

Since May was National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, we couldn’t resist the chance to compare … Read more

Just back from the Health Datapalooza confab that took place last week—an event now in its 4th year hosted by the federal government. I had a few lingering thoughts to share. First, on the event name: I’m guessing it came out of my old business partner and current national CTO Todd Park’s experience in Washington, where trying to get any single distinct thought through “the interests” could knock the “palooza” out of a grown stallion.

You’d think the federal government would be the last ones to host a Datapalooza, but the fact is NO ONE ELSE has stepped up!

So … Read more