Cloud Services | Disruptive Technology | Ideas & Research
So Just What Is an MDP?
Is MDP a Mobile Digital Player?
Most Despised Person?
Nope.
It’s More Disruption, Please!
If you’ve read the blog lately, you’ll know that last year we started the More Disruption Please initiative to convene fellow health care innovators and, together, accelerate the pace of positive change in health care. In this way, MDP serves as an incubation community for fresh ideas and, potentially, the next big thing that could truly transform health care… like, for example, a handheld GPS for your health.
We started MDP, and we’ll keep doing it, because we want to make health care work as it should… as soon as possible and in as many ways as possible. Physicians, medical groups, and health systems need to let go of aging, static platforms for EHR, for example, and embrace real-time, dynamic applications and services that enable them to transact and communicate efficiently with supply chain partners and patients. What the health information technology (HIT) space needs is a steady surge of disruptive innovation to break us free from our path dependence and the sickening spirals of inefficiency, waste, and outrageously high costs that plague U.S. health care.
So, how do we foster this innovation through MDP?
- Health care needs new players and fresh talent. The regulation and sales constraints in health care scare away most venture capital money and venture-eligible entrepreneurs. We need to entice them to participate because we believe that no true innovation happens from the inside. Why? Innovation is disruptive and hurtful. Things get broken and people doing things the old way lose their jobs. The people who run the established players in any market try to keep disruption peaceful and stable… and thus, can’t be very innovative. But, if we don’t innovate more in the health care market, there will be no health market—because the government will nationalize it all when it goes bankrupt.
- As athenahealth grows, we become a little more stable and, well, a little less disruptive ourselves. We need to hang with these new crazy people, soak up some of their vision, and accept their tolerance for risk. We are big and strong, but we are a gnat compared to what we should be in terms of size and strength. Think we’re big now with 2,000+ employees, 25,000+ physicians on our cloud-based network, and $3 billion in market cap? Come back when we get to 100,000 docs and ask me how disruptive we’ve been lately.
- To meet the increasingly wide range of interests of our clients, we have to invite others to sell to them. We just can’t be the best in the world at delivering everything that a doctor needs over the cloud and through an electronic health record. Hence, by sharing access to our clients and their needs, we give up some pie, but make the pie so much larger that we are fine with it. Furthermore, if these entrepreneurs build something amazing and closely fitted with us, we might be able to give them and their VCs a comfortable financial exit by acquiring the technology and then integrating a new capability into athenaNet that is already tested and successful!
Under the MDP program, we sponsor hack-a-thons, meet-ups and webinars, and, in late September at Point Lookout in Maine, we held our annual MDP gathering. Along with a contingent from athenahealth and various venture capital firms, 50 CEOs from the disruptive end of HIT each gave a two-minute “elevator pitch.” The next day, the top five were each given 10 minutes to present to 2,000 of our clients via WebEx. Take a look at their stuff, and I think you’ll quickly see why we’re so excited about their innovations and natural inclination to disrupt!
So, we need to keep disrupting ourselves in order to change health care… but we can’t do it all on our own. Hopefully, MDP will keep that message closer to our faces.
Interested in joining in the disruption? Sign up!
I think this is a PR mistake if one is concerned about the front-line users of the software. It is not cute or funny that so many do, in fact, find EMRs to be intrusive, clumsy, unfriendly, and “disruptive.” They were designed first with finance, coding and government/insurance company interaction in mind -NOT provider first, patient first, communication first.
Not that it matters, but I don’t like it, and I know software can and should make it better.
Jonathan,
I’m a big fan of “shaking things up” but you have to remember it’s a thin line between “disruptive” and “dysfunctional”. I am quite concerned that your back end operations are falling into the latter. Perhaps we should focus more on “perfecting” before “disrupting”. Please contact me if you’d like to hear more about suggestions for improvement
mkennedy@orthogrouponline.com
Hi Marla.
Thanks for piping up.
First, you are right about stability trumping cuteness in health care. In fact, our bonus pool puts stability of athenaNet FIRST, followed by our clients’ operations and satisfaction, then our financial performance, and our growth (including new stuff) LAST. Last month we read over 5 million faxes for our athenaClinicals clients. That’s just the stuff that still doesn’t come in over our electronic connections…and we have over 5,000 connections (interfaces) connecting to over 25,000 supply chain partners handling over 28 million transactions a month (e.g., claims, ERA, eligibility, lab results, imaging results, inbound clinical documents, and prescription renewals). Our last mile team is up over 70 people building connections and getting rid of that paper. Our athenaCoordinator service even creates a business model where both senders and receivers can improve their bottom line by connecting electronically.
Furthermore, our MDP (More Disruption Please) program is, in a big way, designed to allow us to keep this focus. The idea is, allow other companies to offer our clients nifty new features at a pace and variety that they want in order for us to keep our clients happy while focusing our R&D resources on our core comparative advantage, which includes the kind of stuff you are concerned about.
Overall, athenaClinicals is steadily improving…in fact our client satisfaction scores, both internal and as ranked by KLAS, are popping way up while we hear the plain ol’ software guys are going the other way.
That being said, you are absolutely right that we should live by our “priorities waterfall” and tend to our own laundry first.
Thanks for reaching out.