Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush (Part 6)

SM: Do you plan to implement technologies like knowledge bases, automated web self services, and other similar systems?

JB: Bingo. The first thing you do in healthcare is solve existing problems. Once you have the solution implemented, then you can start asking how to improve the solution, and you do that on your own time. All doctors care about is that we will answer the phone on the first ring and they will not lose as many appointments. Then we will have to illustrate that many patients would rather just hit a website and change their appointments or look up lab results themselves. They would like to do all the things they do everywhere else in their lives.

SM: I am listening to you, and in many ways the technological innovation we are talking about has been around for a long time.

JB: It definitely has, but it has not been packaged in a way that makes the doctor more money.

SM: It has not been applied in the context of the healthcare industry.

JB: That’s right. I think the primary reason for that is the packaging. It has not been done in a manner to make doctors more money. Lots of people put out technology, or even give it away on the pretenses of making things better for society. They ask doctors to use it at their own expense, which will cost the doctors time yet not help them make money. That is no way to do business.

Doctors are business-savvy. They are good men and women, but at the end of the day they need to make money. They are in business. Anyone in business will do things that will improve their business rather than things that will make it worse.

We talk about the plutonium sneakers at athenahealth. The plutonium sneakers are the hospital that says, “We have access to all these plutonium sneakers, and in order to win our physicians’ loyalty we are going to give them out to all the doctors in our community. The CEO then sees the doctors and says, “Hey doctor, I noticed you are not wearing your free sneakers we gave out, why?” and the doctor says, “They have plutonium in them!”, and  the hospital CEO says, “Yeah, but they are free!’” That is a little bit like saying, “Doctor, I noticed you are not on the hospital’s new free EMR”, because the doctor is going to answer, “It slows me down”. It does not matter if it is free or not if it makes life worse for the doctor.

SM: Jonathan, what has been your key to being able to really understand and crack this market? There have been a lot of failed attempts at it.

JB: The secret today for an entrepreneur is to do work for actual people and use the Internet to help you. Providing tools or web apps and hoping to get licenses, advertising or page views is not a very current business model. People have complicated work to do that is ugly. The Internet won’t solve it alone, but if you use the Internet you will improve the work. You run into very few businesses that will undertake doing work with the Internet.

SM: What you are promoting is a technology-enabled business model instead of technology as a service.

JB: Correct. SaaS is dead, long live SES, or software-enabled service.

SM: There is a lot of talk in the government about the stimulus package and healthcare IT. What do you expect to be the outcome or impact of all of that movement?

JB: We are of two minds. All of the attention, energy and money into the space creates an electrification and excitement that our sales people are loving. From a practical, short-term tactical perspective we are very excited about our near-term sales.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush
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