At Boston Tech Week, AI co-creation in real time

Every health tech event sets out to “fix” healthcare. But most of them wrap with little more than a slide deck.

So, we tried something different. In late May, the athenaInstitute™ sponsored an AI Innovation in Healthcare event as part of Boston Tech Week. Instead of filling our headquarters with keynote speakers and polished slides, we welcomed customers, partners, and developers to take part in a full day co-creation and hackathon event. We gave them six hours — and very real problems to solve, all sourced from areas of friction our clinicians encounter every day across the health ecosystem.

There were no keynotes about the future of care, just teams building against healthcare’s most persistent challenges: prior authorizations, overloaded inboxes, referral bottlenecks, lab results no one can decode. By the end of the day, we had several working prototypes to iterate on and potentially bring to market.

Weeks after everyone has gone home, what has lingered is a sense of inspiration. We saw firsthand how much stubborn friction can be tamed when you bring the right people together in the same room. At first, we were lamenting that Boston Tech Week only happens once per year. But now, we’re asking: How soon can we do this again?

Needless to say, we’re already planning our next hackathon. Until then, read on for the three biggest takeaways from our AI Innovation in Healthcare event:

1. We didn’t invent the problems — but they are ours to help solve

We didn’t kick-off the event by handing teams a list of hypothetical challenges created in-house; rather, co-development was the name of the game. The problems the developers spent all day on came straight from the people who experience them daily, because this is what we’re here to help solve.

For example, a family physician in Maine told us he still has to request faxes just to learn what happened to his own patient. A psychiatric nurse practitioner described fighting denials one painstaking letter at a time. An orthopedic informatics lead walked us through the fifteen-page disability forms her staff still fill out by hand. The whole room leaned into experiences like these — systemic problems begging to be solved.

And in our co-creation sessions, some customers did more than describe what they needed. One integrative-practice coordinator from New Hampshire designed a working chart-prep widget on the spot, built to give her nurses time back before every annual physical.* We were reminded that the closer someone sits to a problem, the better the solution they build.

2. The most honest conversations were about what’s still broken, and how we fix them together

We deliberately fostered a safe space for constructive feedback and ideation amongst our customers. We knew the event was working the moment attendees started openly sharing what wasn’t.

Our builder fireside discussion, “What I wish I knew before I built,” asked partners like OhMD and Droxi.ai to give a room full of other developers actionable insights about integrating on our platform: what surprised them, what was harder than expected, what nobody bothers to feature in a blog post.

Our own engineering and product leads opened the day talking about API security, data access, and where our tools still fall short. One host set the tone upfront, “you get out what you put in, so ask us the hard questions and say what isn’t working.” The candor fuels us. We know we cannot co-create anything real if we only talk about the wins.

3. Nobody builds the future of healthcare alone

At any moment of the day, the answer to who solves the challenges in healthcare was obvious. It was never one individual, one team, or one company. The event hosted so many different stakeholders and varied perspectives, from independent practices and marketplace partners to developers brand new to healthcare, and sponsors including Microsoft, Apollo, and Snowflake, all building on the same platform. 

A primary care CEO from Rhode Island put it plainly when he described what he needs from a technology partner: to play well in the sandbox with everything else they’re doing. A neurology IT director from North Carolina walked us through the work of getting athenahealth and Epic to exchange referrals through a shared standard, and she called it “the two of them becoming friends.” 

The same was true of the AI itself. The clinicians leaning into it hardest weren’t relying on one tool from any single vendor; they were assembling it from across the ecosystem. One psychiatric practice spent two years co-developing specialty-specific ambient documentation workflows with a marketplace partner while piloting athenahealth’s own. A primary care group runs athenahealth’s diagnostic coding tools alongside a third-party vendor doing complementary work and external scheduling apps built on our APIs. Even the most advanced AI in the room ran on partnership. 

This what a healthy ecosystem looks like, and it’s why we keep saying healthcare’s hardest problems get solved together — or not at all.

Where fixing healthcare begins 

To be clear, we didn’t magically fix all of healthcare’s complexities in a day, no matter how productive we were. But, we did find important insights worth keeping and tested collaborative pathways that can take us closer. 

To cure the complexities of healthcare — and we believe that’s possible — days like this one are a glimpse of what it will take: different perspectives in one room, an open invitation to build in front of each other, and the honesty to name what isn’t quite working yet. 

That’s the premise behind the athenaInstitute: convening perspectives from across the industry to work on healthcare’s complexity together. There’s never been a better moment to jump in. The technology is more capable, the ambition higher, and the need more urgent than ever. We’re ready to meet it, bringing together developers, problem-solvers, and industry analysts to build in the open, hand-in-hand with the people these innovations are meant to serve. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in, and this event reminded us exactly why. 

For more stories of innovation from practices across the U.S., check in monthly with the athenaInstitute for our new series, Innovation Spotlight.