Identifies Disruptive Innovation, Open Collaboration, Meaningful Use Performance Accountability, and Nurtured Leadership as Core to NHIT Success
athenahealth Celebrates National Health IT Week
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athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based , (), and care coordination services today, in celebration of (NHIT Week), announced its top health IT initiatives, all focused on advancing disruptive innovation in health care.
Faced with a perfect storm of dramatic regulatory change and technological upheaval, health care providers across the country are consumed with how to achieve Meaningful Use, navigate risk-based payment programs, and prepare for ICD-10—all while advancing patient care. athenahealth, through its delivery of cloud-based technology and services, is committed to helping health care organizations thrive in the face of change.
athenahealth has identified the following initiatives as its top NHIT priorities for the remainder of 2012, ones that will set the groundwork for ongoing, innovation-driven improvement in the coming years:
“National Health IT week provides a powerful backdrop to highlight disruptive innovation in health care. It’s exciting and increasingly important for everyone to understand how technology fits into the broad health care ecosystem,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and Chairman, athenahealth. “The More Disruption Please program, the Leadership Forum, and our full transparency philosophy on Meaningful Use are three undertakings that will significantly accelerate innovation and promote thought leadership in health care. At the core of these programs is the need for open collaboration, ongoing learning, and the commitment to leverage innovation in meaningful, connected ways.”
Supporting the mission of NHIT week to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the U.S. health care system, over the next several months, athenahealth will advance the above initiatives in the following ways:
No longer dominated by old, proprietary systems, the Health IT landscape is quickly evolving by way of disruptive code-a-thons, innovative start-ups, and open platforms and systems, in addition to well-funded incubator and accelerator programs. This fast-moving reality has shifted the focus toward new, emerging themes: data accessibility, partnerships, and connectivity.
Enabling, promoting, and even accelerating this massive surge in disruptive innovation is critical to making health care work as it should. To help contribute, and to promote this new disruptive innovation energy taking over the Health IT space, athenahealth has started the MDP program.
Kicking off at athenahealth’s Point Lookout conference center in Maine on September 17, more than 100 CEOs of Health IT companies and start-ups, venture capitalists, innovators, and entrepreneurs will gather to discuss the health care ecosystem and explore where and how disruptive innovation can drive change. This three-day event will host leadership from academic, government, non-profit, and enterprise industry segments. For more information on the program, visit .
“athenahealth’s More Disruption Please program spurs cross-industry collaboration to speed high-value innovation in health care,” said Bill Brown, CEO, . “Entrada’s voice-powered clinical documentation technology provides clear benefit to the electronic health record workflow, and, with our partnership with athenahealth, we’re able to integrate our speech-to-text solutions directly within the EHR, accelerating physician adoption. Across the MDP program, there’s a shared vision to integrate technologies that complement each other and make them more accessible so that providers can realize the benefits of innovation without sacrificing their focus on patient care.”
Through the delivery of its cloud-based EHR, athenaClinicals, athenahealth partners with health care organizations to simplify Meaningful Use criteria while keeping providers focused on patient care. athenahealth remains the only leading EHR vendor that tracks providers’ progress against Meaningful Use measures and publishes those results to the broader public. athenahealth will maintain this level of transparency—and calls on other vendors to do the same—as it begins implementing functionality in support of the Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements across its entire provider base.
Recognized as a “trailblazer” by Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, at ONC’s Consumer Health IT Summit this morning, athenahealth is committed not only to transparency but to upgrading its cloud-based EHR so that providers can have the functionality to meet Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements to view, download, and electronically transmit well ahead of the 2014 deadline. athenahealth is also committed to using the Blue Button logo, which represents a joint collaboration between the Department of Veteran Affairs, the Department of Defense, CMS and the Markle Foundation’s Consumer Engagement Workgroup enabling patients to assemble and download personal health information into a single, portable file.
The will host a series of Institutes and introduce must-read articles, Leadership Insights, and Harvard Business Review blog contributions—all aimed at medical enterprise leader development and advancement. The Forum website is open to all and can be found at .
“The Leadership Forum is the place for health care leaders to go for fresh, relevant, succinct content that will advance the way they approach and overcome health care challenges,” said Professor Nancy F. Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School and Forum Faculty Chair. “Innovation is key to the future of health care, but it will only be as effective as the leaders who strategically apply it. The Forum is a unique platform for interactive conversations and learning opportunities for both established and emerging health care leaders.”
athenahealth, Inc. is a leading provider of cloud-based business services for physician practices. athenahealth’s service offerings are based on proprietary web-native practice management and () software, a continuously updated payer knowledge-base, integrated back-office service operations, and care coordination services. For more information, please visit or call (888) 652-8200.
Now in its seventh year, National Health IT Week is a collaborative forum assembling key health care constituents—vendors, provider organizations, payers, pharmaceutical/biotech companies, government agencies, industry/professional associations, research foundations, and consumer protection groups—working together to elevate national attention to the necessity of advancing health IT. Log onto for more information.