Innovation is not a solo sport

To innovate well, invite your customers to your development team

When you think “innovator,” you might picture a solo researcher in the lab, or a coder having a eureka moment in a late-night burst of effort. But at athenahealth, innovation has never been a solo sport.

After years of leading product development at athenahealth, I’ve found that real healthcare innovation doesn’t come from a single person or source. The greatest innovations emerge when we join forces with one another — bringing our diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to the table — and apply our collected brain power to the thorny problems of healthcare IT.

This philosophy isn't just a nice-to-have at athenahealth. It's the foundation of how we strategically approach some of the most complex challenges in healthcare IT today.

Giving customers a seat at the innovation table

One of our most powerful collaborations started with a simple question during a Hackathon in early 2025: "What happens if we put ChatGPT on top of a patient chart?" That kernel of an idea, born from internal brainstorming sessions, eventually became what we now call Sage — our AI-powered assistant that's transforming how physicians interact with patient data.

But here's what set this project apart: we didn't rely on our expectations of how clinicians would use it. Frankly, we couldn’t. AI in healthcare is still so new, and our development teams, though highly experienced in healthcare IT, are not clinicians themselves. Knowing we needed first-hand clinician input, we identified several physicians who were willing to participate in early development and invited them to use a pre-alpha version of the functionality — live, in their practices, with real patients.

Their feedback has been invaluable. The physicians used the feature, told us what was working, and pointed out how the development team could tweak it to make it even better. We heard about use cases we never imagined, as well as significant time savings that made the experiment an over-the-top success. One participant told us the feature was “saving the nurses ~2 minutes of chart prep per patient... a HUGE saver of time.”

For a second clinical feature in development, we rounded up another group of physicians and conducted another trial run. Once again, the physicians’ feedback accelerated our ability to innovate and improve the new offering. Best of all, the engineer/clinician teams really enjoyed the collaboration. What started as an experiment has since shaped how we think about customer-developer collaboration – something we’ll be sharing more about soon.

It’s our responsibility to empower our teams and our customers to do things that seemed impossible just months ago.

Innovation and organizational change management: Upskilling the R&D organization with AI

In 2025, we took our healthcare innovation methodology even further by reimagining our traditional Codefest structure. Codefest is an annual in-house event at athenahealth: an opportunity for athenistas to take one big idea from the preceding Hackathon, develop it (typically in less than two weeks), and release it in production. But this year, we pivoted from coding output to knowledge intake and experimentation.

As an organization, athenahealth is prioritizing the adoption and use of AI in all facets of our business – from features that use AI to features that are developed with AI. With the opportunity to focus our R&D teams on a single project for one concentrated period, we asked: How can we use Codefest to accelerate our use of AI to help develop new features?

The result was a first at athenahealth: a two-week AI “boot camp” featuring knowledge sharing, experiments, insights, best practices, and peer-to-peer presentations and demonstrations, all designed to spark the team’s excitement and ideation around AI use. Attendees learned how leveraging AI can accelerate development — and they’re already putting that knowledge to work with astonishing results.

Here’s an example I’m particularly excited about. During the fall 2025 Codefest, while many team members were away at our Thrive customer symposium, a few engineers took an internal specification document, fed it into an AI code assist tool, and created a new clinical experience. What we originally projected would take months of development was accomplished in a matter of days — and was ready to demonstrate by the time the team returned from Thrive.

This year’s Codefest became “the rising tide that lifts all boats” for athenahealth’s R&D organization to become more comfortable using AI tools. As a change management tool, it’s been absolutely necessary. Among engineers as well as physicians, the prospect of incorporating AI in healthcare IT has elicited a wide range of reactions, from excitement to skepticism. Early adopters are eager to push up their sleeves and lean in; while others worry whether AI will obstruct the delivery of care or make their jobs obsolete.

That’s why taking the time to bring everyone along is crucial to our capacity to innovate. AI is a tool we must harness so each of us can work more effectively. AI in healthcare will not replace a physician, but as I see it, a physician who uses AI will displace a physician who does not. The same principle applies to engineers, product managers, and everyone else in our industry.

Innovation is a team sport. Who’s on your roster?

At athenahealth, we're not just building healthcare IT products. We're building the future of healthcare technology through unprecedented collaboration. Whether it's through customer partnerships, cross-functional engineering efforts in Codefest, or the creative brainstorming of Hackathons, the best healthcare innovations emerge when diverse perspectives come together with a shared purpose.

It’s our responsibility to empower our teams and our customers to do things that seemed impossible just months ago. As we move forward, we're not only keeping pace with the rapid evolution of AI and healthcare technology; we're helping to define it, one collaboration at a time.