Jonathan Bush is the former Chief Executive Officer of athenahealth, Inc. He co-founded the company in 1997 and took it public in 2007 in the most successful initial public offering that year. Today, athenahealth remains one of the healthcare information technology industry’s fastest growing companies.
Bush’s views on healthcare and the idea for athenahealth were born from failures with the earliest iteration of its business model. Bush co-founded and operated a birthing clinic with the idea of franchising a network of clinics that viewed pregnancy holistically. Bush would soon realize that his birthing clinic vision was challenged by his business’s own inability to track outstanding claims to insurers and get paid in a reasonable time-frame. This challenge would shape the formation of athenahealth as it is known today. As a result of the challenges with the clinics, Bush and his partners set about designing a solution to address the costly administrative inefficiencies that plagued their business. In doing so, they came to realize their circumstance was more typical than unique and that the solution they designed had great application and utility for the broader health delivery system. Given his vision for an information infrastructure that makes healthcare work as it should, Bush is focused on creating a true, win-win marketplace that enables a broad and efficient exchange of health information.
In addition, Bush has announced a forthcoming book: “Where Does It Hurt? An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care.” The book, written together with Steve Baker, author of The Numerati, will be published May 15th.
“Where Does It Hurt” is a provocative, irreverent, sometimes harrowing and, of course, always humorous journey through the dark underbelly of the American healthcare system – why it’s broken, what the fix will involve, and where innovation is already taking hold.