Building the operating system for modern ambulatory care

Healthcare delivery is shifting rapidly — and the center of gravity is no longer inside the hospital walls. More preventive care, chronic condition management, and even traditionally complex procedures are moving into community settings. Ambulatory care isn’t just growing; it’s evolving.

At athenahealth, we believe the future of healthcare hinges on whether providers can keep pace with this shift. That’s why we’re not trying to be everything to everyone. Instead, we’re building the infrastructure for modern outpatient care — purpose-built tools, data connections, and an ecosystem of partners that support the entire patient journey. We see ourselves as developing the operating system for ambulatory care, and that shapes everything we do: our investments in AI, our product roadmap, and the partnerships we pursue.

Why focus on ambulatory care?

Community-based care is where growth, innovation, and opportunity are converging. It's where value for patients is created and preventive treatment is delivered. Primary care, urgent care, specialty practices, federally qualified health centers, and large enterprise outpatient groups all face shared challenges: workforce shortages, rising administrative complexity, payer pressures, and a system still struggling to connect the dots across settings.

By focusing on these environments, we’re better positioned to solve their specific problems — from simplifying documentation to improving data sharing to helping practices thrive in value-based care arrangements.

Our goal is not just to digitize existing workflows, but to help practices and clinicians operate more effectively, spend more time on meaningful care, and grow sustainably in a world where care is delivered beyond the hospital campus. We measure this in the outcomes we deliver — reduced administrative work, improved financial performance, and quality outcomes, not just the features we ship.

Partnerships as a strategic advantage

Solving healthcare challenges isn’t something any one company can do alone. That’s why our approach to partnerships is intentional — they aren’t just logos. They’re strategic bets on how healthcare should work. We take the time to make sure our partners are properly integrated and that those workflows are transparent to our customers to select them.

Our platform is open by design, with layers of partnerships that extend our capabilities:

• Plug-and-play integrations from our Marketplace,
• White-labeled solutions that embed seamlessly into our products,
• Deeper collaborations, from AI-driven documentation tools to advanced analytics and clinical data sharing networks, and
• Connections across our network that every customer benefits from.

These partnerships all serve a single goal: making life easier for our customers and the patients they serve. And they differentiate us from legacy players who often rely on closed systems and vendor lock-in. The future belongs to those who can build strong networks, not to those who operate in silos. We’ve been committed to that model for years.

The future belongs to those who can build strong networks, not to those who operate in silos.

Strategy with staying power

Our corporate strategy is guided by clarity of focus. We identify where friction and fragmentation exist in ambulatory care — and where we can bring differentiated value. That’s what drives our investments, whether in AI, product capabilities, or strategic acquisitions.

Growth for us isn’t about scale for its own sake. It’s about mission-driven growth: ensuring every step we take strengthens our ability to help practices navigate change — from workforce shortages and payer complexity to the rise of value-based care.

Internally, that means staying aligned. Strategy doesn’t live in a slide deck; it’s about how our teams communicate day-to-day with each other. It lives in how we bring together our people, products, and partners to execute as a singular team.

Looking ahead

Ambulatory care is evolving quickly, and we’re building the infrastructure that helps practices thrive as it does. By focusing on openness, interoperability, and purpose-built solutions, we’re creating a system that’s flexible, scalable, and future-ready.

The future of healthcare will be shaped by those who can simplify complexity and connect across the ecosystem. That’s the work we’re committed to — giving physicians and practices the tools and partnerships they need to deliver care in new ways, and positioning athenahealth to lead as care moves beyond the hospital walls.

Learn more about how we listen to physicians to build tools they can use.