Entrada & athenahealth

athenahealth Celebrates National Health IT Week Identifies Disruptive Innovation, Open Collaboration, Meaningful Use Performance Accountability, and Nurtured Leadership as Core to NHIT Success

WATERTOWN, Mass., Sep 10, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health record (EHR), and care coordination services today, in celebration of National Health IT Week (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: -- More Disruption Please (MDP) - A unique and growing HIT innovation program. MDP members include innovators, entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and individuals who share the vision of creating a massive surge of disruptive innovation to make health care work as it should.

-- Full Transparency on Meaningful Use - A commitment to full transparency and accountability on how providers who use the athenaClinicals(R) cloud-based EHR are performing against Meaningful Use measures; to date, more than 85 percent of eligible providers using athenaClinicals have attested for Stage 1 Meaningful Use.

-- Leadership Forum - An athenahealth initiative (including events, a website, and an online community) launched in partnership with Harvard Business Review with the mission to create and nurture the leaders that health care deserves.

athenahealth recognizes that transforming health care will require not only disruptive technology but inspired leadership.

"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: Host Second Annual "More Disruption Please" Event 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 17th, 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

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"athenahealth's More Disruption Please program spurs cross-industry collaboration to speed high-value innovation in health care," said Bill Brown, CEO, Entrada, Inc. "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." Call for More "Meaningful Use" Transparency and Accountability 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.

article courtesy of CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/48974403