As a leader, you must do everything you can to encourage people to admit mistakes they have made and to call out problems they have found in the organization. (As Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School similarly suggested in an earlier post). If people think they will get in trouble for having erred, or for having brought up a systemic problem in the organization, those errors and problems will go unreported. The person and the organization will thereby lose an opportunity to grow and improve. Accordingly, a strong commitment not only to transparency but to a just culture is … Read more

Each spring at our annual User Conference, athenahealth honors those who embody the athenahealth vision of helping “make health care work as it should,” a topic our CEO Jonathan Bush spoke about in depth during his TEDMED presentation back in April.

This year, for the first time, athenahealth clients nominated and decided the athenaVision award winner. And with over 65% of the vote, this year’s winner was: Midlands Orthopaedics from Columbia, SC! Here is a great picture of Midlands’ Lynde Bledsoe, business office manager, and Stephanie Jackson, RN, clinical manager, accepting the award at User Conference 2013, on behalf of … Read more

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

An athenahealth client recently reminded me of this quote attributed to Michelangelo, which nicely summarizes one of the main themes that emerged as part of the America Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Summit in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. In theory, ACOs lead to more integrated care and sustainable cost growth throughout the health care system; in practice, ACOs are creating issues in the market that should be proactively addressed via regulation and the forming of new ACOs.

Some details about this first-ever Summit: … Read more

Before I provide some background—and recommendations—regarding the regulation of mobile health (mHealth) apps, be they drug lookups, electronic medical records (EMR) or otherwise, let me begin with one statement: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulating and defining mobile medical reference apps is like an agency regulating calculators because long division exists. The FDA regulates an action that’s completed with greater accuracy and ease electronically vs. the traditional written format.

Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, on to the topic at hand.

Based on the FDA’s Draft Guidance for Mobile Medical Applications, it … Read more

According to the latest census, nearly 85% of Americans have some form of health insurance. We know that the implementation of Obamacare will result in an increase in this number, but we have no guarantee that the additional costs associated with better access to care will be counteracted by improvements in overall health.

Of course, we are hopeful that health care reform will help (and, at least not hurt), but we believe a simpler approach to cost containment would be to bring the most American of pastimes to health care: shopping. Today with the intricacies of, and variancies in, medical … Read more