athenista Spotlight: Meet Ed Park
athenahealth's Chief Software Architect talks about how the company got started and his focus areas for 2007.
athenaPulse: Tell us about your position at athenahealth.
Ed Park: I am the Chief Software Architect, responsible for software development and running our production infrastructure. We have a staff of 70 at our Watertown HQ, as well as about 50 developers in India.
aP: Are you related to Todd Park?
EP: How did you guess? Yes, Todd is my brother.
aP: Have you been at athenahealth as long as Todd?
EP: Not quite but Todd co-opted me in 1998 when he and Jonathan were running their women's health practice in San Diego. At that time we were interested in developing EMR technology. We quickly learned, however, that there was this black hole in medical practice management called billing and basic financial reporting. We decided that if we wanted to get paid, we'd better fix that problem. So we built a financial revenue cycle system. That's how athenahealth began.
aP: What changes can clients expect to see in athenaNet in 2007?
EP: I think that athenaNet was originally successful because we made life at the practice as simple as we could: registration, check-in, check-out, charge entry, and the Workflow Dashboard. Over the years, we have continued to build great functionality into athenaNet including unpostable worklists, deposit wizards, more reporting fields, and so on. In 2007 we will be putting a lot of effort into making the athenaNet experience easier and more transparent to our clients while continuing to enhance the system's functionality.
aP: Are you finding that physicians are becoming more savvy with regards to HIT these days?
EP: In some ways yes but it's interesting that they don't teach the financial cycle to students in medical school. It's a painful process for most doctors to figure out. Unless you get the financial cycle right, it's hard to keep the business alive.
aP: What other products are you working on?
EP: athenaClinicals, our new electronic medical record (EMR) service to improve the clinical workflow, is our biggest development effort right now. The development process is split into two parts -- the front end user application and clinical services, where we take over management of clinical information coming into the office. The average health care provider receives 100 documents a day. We scan all clinical documents the office generates (e.g., lab results and prescriptions) and file them in the respective EMR.
aP: That sounds exciting.
EP: Yes, and on the financial cycle side, we are also focusing on athenaMailboxSM. Our goal with athenaMailbox is to replace the bank lockbox system, which is expensive for our clients. athenahealth already handles all of a practice's EOBs, so adding check handling is a relatively straightforward extension.
aP: How would you describe the culture at athenahealth given all of these new innovations?
EP: Our team continues to embrace the hard charging innovative culture of the internet boom of the late 90's. We take our work seriously and work very hard. Some people pull all-nighters. But we play hard as well. We have an Ultimate Frisbee summer league. We hang out a lot and do puzzles together. But with that being said, the last eight years of the school of hard knocks has taught us discipline. We know when to play and when to buckle down and do our work.
