(2011-02-15) Bush Athena Interview

Interview with Jonathan Bush of Athena Health. Nation didn’t want vertical integration and more pricing power as the cost of healthcare goes up. You know they wanted more buying power, not less... The JP Morgan guy who runs the desk that floats the bonds that hospitals use to finance their activities — these not-for-profit hospitals, you know, they depend on good bond ratings — he said that between 30% and 45% of all the bonds he’s floated in 2010 are underwritten by software, but the life of those bonds, the payback period, is between 10 and 15 years. I don’t know. Do you, Mr. H I Stalk, have any 10- to 15-year-old applications running on your D: drive there?

*The specific problem was this was part of the ARRA. This was supposed to be a set of shovel-ready projects. The mandate is to spend the money. It’s not to incent people who cross a bar, which would be a very cost-effective program because they could set the bar where it really ought to be and no one would pass, and we’d really separate the wheat from the chaff.

But that’s the rubric this program was authorized under. This was, “Get the $30 billion in the economy.” What has been going on since the original ARRA bill passed was the bar has been lowered and lowered and lowered until Oompa Loompa could jump it, so that it could be jumped by everybody, right? And that was their mandate.*

This magical talk that you hear John Halamka going on about middleware is … you know, this is the guy who manages to be on giant billboards but can’t exchange information with the hospital across the street that teaches with the same medical school and the same doctors for 100 years. I love the guy and I’m sure he’s got perfectly good reasons why literally one side of the street can only exchange information via paper airplane. But you know, it’s pretty amazing.

So you look at Minute Clinic. Minute Clinic’s accumulating primary care patients much more quickly than those newly subsidized, newly acquired primary care docs at the hospital. They’re advertising. They’re putting their places where people actually are. They’re aggressively going after patients. What they’re going to do is have athena move them into the hospital only when they actually need to go to the hospital; so they’re going to be a non-hospital ACO. They’re going to be an ACO for whom … I mean, I don’t know what their plans are, but I’m seeing this happen. They’re emerging as a really compelling champion of the patient.

(I want to) form the first hardcore business-to-business Social Network. I want any doctor on AthenaNet to be able to friend any other doctor in the country and be able to execute referrals and authorization. I want to be able to execute the referral and authorization work so that they can move patients back and forth anywhere they want to move with a click and have all the crap-work go away.