What do you get when you mash together dozens of cutting-edge entrepreneurs, CEOs, developers, venture capitalists and athenahealth leaders, all on top of a mountain overlooking the Penobscot Bay in Maine? You get the disruptive ideas that are needed to improve health care and health information technology.

You also get Ali G.

Not the real Ali G (as played by Sacha Baron Cohen), but our CEO, Jonathan Bush, kicking off the 2nd annual More Disruption Please confab with his rendition of the often confused interviewer, explaining how athenahealth gets physicians the “ka-ching and da bling for doing the right thing!” Luckily, the crowd, some of whom had never seen him speak in public or didn’t know who he was imitating, laughed anyway. Mostly.

Once out of character, Jonathan explained athenahealth’s three concentric points of view, with preservation of the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship at the very center.

Some more highlights from the first day:

• Professor of extended enterprise management at Babson College, Marty Anderson, explained the chaos of everyone’s medical records, scattered hither and yon across the U.S. “This is an unsolvable problem in the United States…with centralized systems!”
• New athenahealth board member, and former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Baker, ran a lively discussion on the future state of U.S. health care.
• CEOs provided two-minute pitches to describe how their start-ups are moving the ball forward, whether it’s with a monitoring app for heart attack survivors, a new ‘symptom-to-provider pathway’ or faster ways for doctors to chart clinical documentation.

At the end of the day, choppy Maine seas diverted the More Disruption Please crowd from sailboat races over to the Frisbee golf course. Judging from the subsequent downpour, it was wise move. After we wrap up  today, expect a full and detailed report from Kyle Armbrester, director of business development.