athenahealth News & Views
Ceci n’est pas un Blog
Please no.
Not another CEO who thinks he’s gonna be a girl-of-the-people by blogging in an over-controlled way. I’ve been blogging internally here at athenahealth for a couple years now and even THAT gets reviewed by our legal team before our own employees see it. Oy.
That said, I just can’t stand to not make noise.
Ya know that movie on the Clancy book where the CIA guys are watching the poor soldiers get massacred on satellite and they can’t do anything about it?
Well with 40 million patients and 25,000 providers on one network, I see in real time dozens of such massacres (and some victories too) all the time that don’t seem to find their way into our national debate.
So here goes another blog…but more of a rant really. You can feel free to post comments—and I’ll even respond—though we all know this is mostly about me talking…as well as a few of my similarly Napoleonic and backed-up-with-things-to-say colleagues (and some guest bloggers doing cool things).
OK, here are just a few of the topics I’d like to cover in more detail in the coming months on the athenahealth blog, along with other stuff I’ll cook up:
- Uniform theory of medical practice – Yes, I do believe that there is one way to move patients through the office. I believe that every practice who says they are different is making a mistake. They either aren’t as different as they think OR they are different but SHOULDN’T be. There, I said it. No, this isn’t about dehumanizing the process. It’s about maximizing the human-to-human (as opposed to human-to-paper) time doctors have with their patients.
- Payers – Whine all you want about these national payers and the profits they make. I watch them move in ways that are certainly not taught in Sunday school and I’m here to tell you: they are a lot more predictable and reliable than state Medicaid plans. The irony of states going after these big nationals while they stink up the place with their own plans drives me berserk—and when you see this year’s PayerView℠ data, it’ll do that to you too.
- Culture – Culture is the most powerful asset of any business. Anyone who tells you that their people are the most valuable thing is a namby-pamby. If they say it’s the customer, they are shallow. If they say it’s profit…well at least they’re honest. Culture is the one thing that you can actually make as a business that:
- Can’t be off-shored
- Can’t be taken away by an employee who leaves you for a better offer
- Keeps management in line as much as it does employees
- Product design – We are done with products, for the most part, as a society. We are too impatient for them. A product is usually a thing that you buy and then use to get some outcome. But this is America people! Just buy the outcome! It is an exhausting thing to build a service that depends on results for revenue, but it is killer once it gets going.
- Innovation – Never think big in this area. Think tiny and then run like mad. Before you know it, big happens. This is seriously at odds with everyone and everything I have seen in the realm of healthcare reform (and not just the Obama thing but every bloody PowerPoint keynote I have ever seen at every bloody conference, class, etc.).
The list goes on…For the two of you reading this, I will also answer any questions for which I can think of a sassy answer that I also happen to believe in.
Thanks for peeking. I hope this works for you over time.
I also hope it makes more doctors learn that athenahealth exists!! We EXIST!!!!!!
Hi Jonathan, I am rather impressed and humored by your blog. Simply stated, yet full of depth. I agree with most of what you said. I might have add to your # 3 and add in “Integrity” as one of the most powerful assets I see in business. Too many times companies decide they want to go after the gold, forget about who is involved, forget about the patients, the doctors,and the world. Let’s just do what we promised (on election day as an example) and forget about the people who supported us along the way. If more decisions were made with the integrity they try to display at election time, we may find ourselves “able” to tolerate the god-forsaken mistakes we tend to make along the way of creating something good. ha – now who’s ranting eh? Overall, your blog was a great read. Keep it up and I promise you will have at least 3 readers on your list. (smile).
Angie from California
Perfect pearls…as usual!
Thanks Jonathan for sharing the wisdom. It is a rare treat to get a guy from your industry say it like it is.
I look forward to the Charlie Rose interview!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by bobcoffield, Justen Deal. Justen Deal said: Jonathan Bush has a blog — and @athenahealth now has 25,000 providers (and 40m patients) giving him crazy ideas. http://j.mp/ahjblog [...]
Jonathan, with this fourth comment, looks like you’ve got double your anticipated readership! Great stuff, as usual, with your typical “truth to me, like it or not” shine. Hope your readership swells to 6, 7, gosh, maybe 8!
Jonathan, I like your commenst on the biggest asset is the “culture ” of the company. i work for a large US multinational that I believe has lost the plot. I have been trying to put my finger on what has gone wrong over the last few years and its the culture that has changed. I was trained in a culture where we worked to ensure customer satisfaction and it was THE key indicator … profit and utilisation figures were secondary. We had an award scheme for consistance employee achivement and awarded people who excelled with gold tie pins ( mostly male at the time ) and inscribed the pins with our “company logo = service” . We wore the pins with pride and customers received and expected good service ..it was in our DNA. Today nobody cares, profit is king, utilisation figures are the main target and customer satisfaction is way down the list ..We wounder why we have lost market share and they are looking for the big innovative idea or the silver bullet to get them out of the dip.
Innovate small and run like mad ..I like it ! We have a saying where I come from where we discribe somebody who makes a lot of sense and makes wise moves as having ” a lot of basic COP ON ” and the saying goes if you could bottle that you would be a rich man .
Good work, I read the entire post. Delivery comes across as genuine, which is a important contribution to #3, above. (PS found you via HISTalk)
Jonathan,
An interesting and candid post. How did you manage to by-pass legal (and JH in Corp Communications) …? I do agree with the majority of your pearls. However, as with many things in life, there are certain exceptions to the rule. Our company recently signed with athenahealth. A rather unique scenario for athenahealth – our practice will test your pearl #1. It may interest you to take a peek at the progress as the implementation team is experiencing a few challenges, constrained as it is by a uniform theory.
I enjoyed your comments regarding innovation. “Big” is happening for us and we are “running like mad”. Hope athenahealth can keep up with the pace as well as enjoy the journey.
Jonathan, please keep this stuff coming. I enjoyed reading every word and will always support someone who tells it like it is. I feel like a majority of the HIT companies out there have developed tunnel vision and simply care about the bottom line. Yes profit and revenue is what keeps a company alive, but when it comes to healthcare it’s the patient we all have to focus on to keep alive. I also found you through HIStalk.
I suspect there are more people reading this blog (all the way to the end!) than comment here. My best takeaway was defining culture as the most important asset of a company. I’ve long understood the power of a company’s culture, but never saw it articulated. Thank you, Jonathan.
Athenahealth is in the sweet spot for both healthcare and technology. Look at the industry trends:
TECHNOLOGY
– Browser-based cloud computing (reduces hardware and support costs, increases access)
– Electronic health records (reduces transcription errors and faxes, adds capabilities for billing, drug interactions, analysis)
– Tablet computers (reduces paper, allows checklists and instant history retrieval)
MEDICINE
– Doctors want to focus on medicine, rather than become office managers. Many reluctantly go into managed care for this reason.
– EHR requirements are coming.
– Insurance billing is increasingly difficult, requiring more time and allowing more opportunity for reduced or missed payments.
From a patient’s perspective: for my next routine physical, I don’t want to spend time on the phone negotiating an available time slot for my doctor that also meets my schedule. I’d rather just bring up his Outlook calendar and book a “meeting time” like I do in the office.
Videos on the website are great. I’m looking for a case study that shows an office before and after, with some time-and-dollars metrics as well as process changes. (It might be there, just haven’t found it yet.) Another frequent office complaint is credentialing; facilitating that part of everyone’s life would be another great benefit Athenahealth could offer.
JB,
Great thoughts. Once again you are ahead of the curve. Keep putting the word out there.