Technology that makes care more human

How AI-native innovation can finally deliver on the promise of connected care

In my nearly seven years as chairman and CEO of athenahealth, I’ve had the privilege of hearing directly from thousands of clinicians, practice leaders, and staff in communities across the country. No matter the size or specialty of the practice, one theme surfaces every time: technology still creates too much work for the people it is meant to support.

For decades, ambulatory care practices have lived with a gap between the promise of digital technology and the reality in the exam room. Tools designed to simplify care has often added steps, screens, or administrative burden. That gap has shaped our mission from the beginning — to cure the complexity that gets in the way of care.

That is why this moment matters. Recently, at our annual Thrive customer conference, I had the privilege of announcing our completely transformed AI-native clinical encounter, the result of passionate work from teams across our company. This new experience represents a meaningful shift. It aligns technology with the way clinicians actually work — not the other way around. It brings to life our goal of building tools that remove friction and return time and purpose to the patient encounter.

This is the core of our AI-native design in healthcare: intelligence that adapts to the human rhythm of care, so clinicians can focus on their patients.

The goal is straightforward. Technology should stay out of the way. It should remove the extra clicks, screens, and steps that pull clinicians away from patients and disrupt the flow of a visit. When technology lightens that load, clinicians can stay present, listen fully, and focus on the patient in front of them. That’s when care feels more human — and more informed.

Building a foundation for connected care

What makes this innovative experience possible isn’t a single feature or algorithm — it’s the network that underpins everything we do. With more than 170,000 providers¹, over 20% of the U.S. population served by clinicians on our network², 315 million claims³, and insights from over 277,000 clinical integrations⁴ flowing across our platform each year, athenahealth has built one of the richest connected datasets in healthcare.

Our Advanced Intelligence Layer draws on that network to surface what matters most in the moment of care — bringing together the right information from across EHRs, payers, and registries — giving clinicians a longitudinal view of the patient’s health.

That same network insight powers the athenaInstitute, our effort to study what’s working across practices nationwide and bring those learnings back to clinicians in the form of research, guidance, and real-world evidence.

Tools like athenaAmbient, our native ambient documentation experience, and Sage, our digital clinical assistant, will transform data into guidance, and complexity into clarity.

That’s the power of connected intelligence: every encounter makes the system smarter, every interaction strengthens the network, and every clinician gains more freedom to practice at the top of their purpose.

Delivering on the promise of modern medicine

Healthcare’s greatest breakthroughs will not come from technology alone — they will come from giving clinicians the time, context, and confidence to do the work only they can do.

When we remove friction, clinicians can spend more time with patients. Practices can direct resources where they can have the most impact. Leaders can make more informed decisions with less administrative strain.

This is how we move from documentation to insight, from disconnected systems to connected care, and from incremental progress to sustained improvement. AI-native technology is not an end in itself; it’s the means to an end: making healthcare more human, at scale.

A new era of collaboration

What excites me most about this moment is not only what we have built, but what it enables across the ecosystem. No single company can fix healthcare alone. But together — clinicians, technologists, developers, payers, innovators — we can create a system where intelligence flows freely, decisions are better informed, and care feels seamless again.

That is what our AI-native encounter represents. It is more than a new capability. It is a shift toward a more connected, collaborative, and human model of care.

Because the future of healthcare is not about asking doctors to work around the system. It is about building a system worthy of doctors — and worthy of the patients they serve.

Bob Segert is the chairman and chief executive officer of athenahealth.