We’ve all experienced it. That rewarding feeling you get right after purchasing a cool new app from the Apple App Store or that must-have item from Amazon.com. At athenahealth, that feeling begs the question: Why can’t we all have that same thrill of shopping in health care? Well, here’s our answer, just announced today: the athenahealth Marketplace, a one-stop shop aimed at equipping providers with innovative health IT solutions, enabling them to provide better care for their patients. (See our official press announcement.)

HIT À La Carte
The athenahealth Marketplace features a slate of technology partners who’ve joined with us through the More Disruption Please (“MDP”) program, our initiative to open up our cloud-based network, and connect with disruptive solutions that can help bend the innovation curve in health care. A number of these partner solutions are already live and available to be rolled out for customers, including transcription partners Entrada and InHealth, and contract management partners, Experian Healthcare and NHXS.

For our partners listed on the Marketplace as “beta”, we have existing or upcoming pilots where we’ll test and streamline their integration, and carefully track performance with an identified subset of athenahealth clients. Our cloud-based platform harnesses incredible data insights that enable us to measure and monitor key performance metrics to ensure that our partners are providing a positive impact to caregivers.

Whether our clients want to optimize scheduling, decrease documentation times, or remove inefficiencies from the physician workflow, we want to make sure we’re offering partner solutions that satisfy those needs, driving real value and addressing key pain points that challenge caregivers today.

In addition to technology partners, the Marketplace also houses an initial sampling of the hundreds of connections we already establish for our clients to labs and public health registries. These clinical exchange connections enable the transfer of patient information across the health care supply chain, vital for driving interoperability and improving the management of health information.

Stay Current on Marketplace Innovation
Over the next few months, we’ll look to bring more technology solutions live for you; and we’re aiming to add more disruptive partner services and clinical exchange connections to the Marketplace by the end of 2013. We invite you to frequently visit and browse our Marketplace for the latest and most innovative HIT solutions we and our partners have to offer.

Better yet, if you’re an HIT entrepreneur or innovator, we welcome you to check out the MDP program, talk with us, and join in our mission to disrupt the status quo in health care through openness, connectivity, and innovation.

I know what you coders and developers are thinking: How can anyone possibly hack medicine in a single weekend? Before you start rattling off statistics surrounding today’s massive health care costs in the US or clamor on about the incredible number of stakeholders in the space, let me tell you about a few development teams who got their start at hack-a-thons and have proven it can be done… yes, in two days.

• Pill Pack simplifies the pharmacy experience by filling, sorting, and delivering medications to you in personalized packets based on when you need to take them.
• The BETH project (Benevolent Technologies for Health) has developed an adjustable prosthetic socket that brings significant cost savings to the multi-million dollar prosthetic care industry and struggles to meet the needs of low-income patients especially in developing countries.
• Smart Scheduling has developed an application that takes the guesswork out of patient scheduling. It optimizes the day’s appointments at medical practices to improve access to care.

Fine, fine, but in a weekend? Well, athenahealth and Hacking Medicine are teaming up for a three-day hack-a-thon event that brings together inventive, forward-thinking minds to change the status quo in health care, just like the organizations listed above. If you are an engineer, entrepreneur, physician, designer or scientist, then come get involved to help drive much-needed industry changes.

By weekend’s end, we’ll have a team, cash prizes, and a hack that will take its first steps towards disrupting health care. Past teams at hack-a-thons just like this one have gone on to found companies, enter business plan competitions and secure venture funding.

The hack-a-thon will take place May 3-5, kicking off with a social event where you can meet other attendees (and get free appetizers!) at Mead Hall located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. The hack-a-thon will then take place at athenahealth’s main campus, 400 Arsenal St. in Watertown, MA. athenahealth will pay round-trip cab fare for attendees, so it’s easy to get to the event (if you apply and are accepted, more details will follow). And we’ll cover all food for the weekend, too.

Come hack EHRs, medical claims, diagnostics or whatever your hacker heart desires. Health care is huge, troubled and in need of your help. No excuses. So what are you waiting for? Apply to the hack-a-thon now! We’re selecting 120 people just like you.

This hack-a-thon is part of athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” (MDP) innovation and partnership program that targets like-minded innovators, entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and individuals who share our vision of making health care work as it should through openness and connectivity of disruptive solutions.

Follow the MDP team on Twitter at @athenaMDP.

Yesterday, athenahealth announced an agreement with Mashery, the world’s leading provider of API management technology and services. This news got us thinking…

Quick show of [virtual] hands: Who really knows what an API is? Not 100 percent sure? Well, read on as our architect (or, as he says, “one of the geeks”) for More Disruption Please tells you everything you need to know about this commonly-used acronym. – Michelle, Social Media Manager

What’s an API? Let’s start by decoding the acronym: Application Programming Interface, a well-defined and well-documented way that two different computer programs talk to one another. For example, have you ever seen those pop-up messages that appear on your iPhone home screen when you use Facebook? Those are the result of Facebook’s app developers leveraging Apple’s iPhone API to make that happen.

However, when we’re talking about APIs at athenahealth we’re speaking to something more specific called web-services-based APIs. In short, these make it easy for one website to exchange information with another, over the Internet, giving rise to the term “programmable web.”

Let’s take a step back with a brief history lesson: The “old” way of doing this was for two companies to privately agree to exchange data, establish connectivity between them (what we call “point-to-point”), and redo the same thing for each new partner.

If you’ve used an app, such as a game on Facebook, and have seen your scores listed with your friends’ scores, you’ve experienced a web-services-based API in action. In this case, the app developer used Facebook’s API to figure out who your friends are. APIs are also used by directory sites like yelp.com to overlay custom information — that’s how we can see pizza places near athenahealth’s Watertown, MA office sitting on top of Google Maps.

Okay, to get a little more technical (don’t worry, this is great geek-talk fodder for your next cocktail party), athenahealth is using a RESTful API, which is, stay with me, an even more specific type of web-services-based API. You may recognize a URL (or, as humans say, web address), such as “http://athenahealth.com/blog/.”

When we talk about a REST or RESTful API, we are talking about URL that has a particular format — among other more complicated details — that is easily read by computers and the humans who program them. For example, if you saw a URL that looked like this: “https://api.athenahealth.com/appointments/newpatient,” you might guess that it returns available appointments for new patients. Another example is “https://api.athenahealth.com/patients/active/male,” which might produce a list of patients who are active in the practice and are male.

Why are we so excited about APIs? One main reason is they enable us to do the work we carry out with our innovative More Disruption Please (MDP) partners. And, thanks to our recent announcement with Mashery, we are able to open our API to partners like iTriage; patients who use iTriage will be able to directly book appointments with athenahealth providers directly from within iTriage’s app.

We have other ways of doing some of these things today. But through our partnership with Mashery, we’re opening up a wider array of options to allow developers, both from traditional health care and outside of it, to create more disruptive solutions. Please.

Want to learn more? Follow Chip and his team on Twitter at @athenaMDP.

As the CEO of Entrada, I (and my team) have spent the last few years pounding the provider pavement, convincing physicians and staff that, even in the brave new world of discrete data and Meaningful Use, there was a way to pull it all off without sacrificing productivity, revenue and quality of life. So I was immediately intrigued when Jonathan Bush approached us last year about a wild new idea: an athenahealth initiative to partner with “new players and fresh talent” to “soak up some of their vision” for the future of health care delivery. These are the big and rather audacious goals of athenahealth’s More Disruption Please (MDP) program.

It was obviously in Entrada’s best interest to team with such an established and well-respected innovator. Since the beginning of our relationship, we have experienced a level of organization and partnership with athenahealth that we have never seen from another partner. athenahealth is serious about following through with this initiative and their team has brought a refreshing energy to our collaboration.

Right out of the gate, I had the opportunity to present Entrada’s solution at the MDP Conference in Maine, which brought together more than 100 industry thought leaders and entrepreneurs with a penchant for disruption and change. Since then, we have been given a level of consistent exposure with key members and constituencies at athenahealth as we fully integrated two platforms.

It has been exciting to see how Entrada and athenahealth have created a true “1+1=3” dynamic, leveraging Entrada’s physician workflow knowledge and mobile dictation platform to increase the value of the athenahealth suite of products and services. This kind of “pie-growing” relationship, often discussed at health care symposiums but rarely realized in the real world, is the bedrock of the MDP program. Instead of trying to become all things to all providers, Entrada now provides athenahealth clients with a leading-edge mobile dictation solution to help enhance physician and staff productivity when using athenahealth. All without the challenges and risk of trying to expand into areas outside of athenahealth’s core competencies.

We are thrilled about the upcoming launch of Entrada onto the athenahealth network, and our joint marketing efforts to athenahealth clients and prospects. And we are equally thrilled to start expanding the partnership via our other workflow solutions in the second quarter of this year.

More important, though, I am quite excited about the positive momentum building not only with Entrada, but with the entire More Disruption Please program. The caliber of companies and individuals we have been exposed to is incredible. athenahealth’s goals for greater collaboration, transparency and disruption may not be the normal mantra of the health care establishment. But they sure are a lot more fun.

I’ll sum up my feelings in one statement: athenahealth truly focuses on their client’s needs and we are proud to be their partner.

Entrada representatives will be present at athenahealth User Conference 2013, April 24-26 in Boston, both in the exhibit hall and at our More Disruption Please panel.

Earlier in March, interview website theEditorial.com spent time with athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, getting his opinion on… well, just about everything. In honor of this standout interview, we’ll be republishing excerpts, in four parts, over the next four weeks. You can also read the entire interview here. We hope you enjoy!

Question: What are you trying to change?

Jonathan Bush:
I think that maybe all of us have very small real reasons that we get started in our careers and then as we get older, we start to think of more grand and acceptable reasons. My small reason was I wanted to, you know, be important. I wanted to save someone’s life and be the guy driving an ambulance. (which he was earlier in his career)

Today, I feel like the whole reason that God, Buddha, whomever it was, sent me down this path is because in this country health care is the biggest hole in our humanity.

We all touch the health care system and we all feel robbed of some of our humanity. At the hospital, the staff gives you a clipboard and you haven’t seen a clipboard since 1982, and you’re like, “What are they doing with the clipboard and will they lose this?” Then, they give you tests that you don’t need. They scare you into doing things to try to cure your cancer that everybody knows full well will not cure your cancer. You do a birth plan to have your baby and you arrive and they laugh at your birth plan.

This type of experience resonated with me because I had some big cousins, siblings and larger than life people around all the time and I wasn’t. I was shy and quiet and un-athletic and not very good in school. For me, the idea of being unnoticed or unprocessed as yourself is just a terrible feeling. The fact that health care is massively expensive, more than we could actually afford, is the least of the problems. What I have a problem with is that it’s humiliating — that the money is taken by force, and care is given by force. It’s either too much or too little and you have no real sense of authorship.

Betty Goot was the lady who ran the pick-your-own farm in Kennebunkport, Maine where my mom and her sisters-in-law were trying to out-Martha Stewart one another. “Of course, I won’t take the ones that are already picked. I will be there on my knees picking the ones for the blueberry pie out there in the field with Betty Goot.” I’m wandering around trying to smell the tractor grease and Betty gets up, bends her back and starts whacking her elbow on the post. I’m thinking what are you doing? And she says, “Well, I got that arthritis and the doctor costs a fortune and I won’t be no left-handed… So, I just give it a good whack and it’ll work again for a couple more hours.”

Question: You remember that as a child?

JB:
Today, vividly. I only vaguely remembered the experience until one day I’m at some consulting firm and a partner starts talking about getting a new shoulder for hundreds of thousands of dollars because he thought it would improve his tennis.

Question: What would be your advice to an entrepreneur today?

JB:
Start with a lot of pathos. Keep trying to channel it into something productive. Resist drugs because they’re better but they don’t make you create things. With Athena Women’s Health (the first incarnation of athenahealth today; a Women’s Obstetrics practice that Jonathan founded with Todd Park) we’d see the research and the equipment was shown to do more harm than good but everyone still plugs them in. Doctors come in and do episiotomies even though it’s shown they are bad. Doctors weren’t present for any of the labor and when they came in, women’s heart rates shot up because the doctor was there. Women would say, “Don’t just fix it. Just hear me.” I was twenty-five years old. And I was fixing it. That was the genesis of athenahealth.