Jonathan Bush from Athena Health on Government Reforms

Great interview on CNN Fast Money program with Jonathan Bush commenting on the investment and reforms and how this might impact his company.

He makes some salient points and in particular the focus on delivering data and focusing on data rather than paying to implement a bunch of "legacy systems" is the way to effect real change. Not using the money to "buy toys with it".

Athena Health helps clinicians get paid more money faster. They deal with the payment back end of health care. As opposed to building your own claim activity or use someone else who specializes like Visa does for retailers. So I guess Athena is the Visa of Health care. They offer Software Enabled Services rather than "shrink wrapped toys". In his word the key process starts with:

Step 1: Crap Removal

They claim to have one of the most sophisticated back ends in the business and they deal with 23,000lbs of paper for their customers each week! How they extract data from this is beyond me if this is coming in in paper form....

Follow this with a program not so much focused on the amount of investment but rather the execution that:

Pay for data and pay for results

Then stop using these legacy devices and start working towards capturing this as data as part of the process. Here he is singing my song and the need to capture the information in computer interpretable form (I have to believe that some portion of the 23,000 lbs of paper is being processed by an army of folks to digitize and extract data from it) and make this a requirement.

Once again Healthstory help satisfy this need allowing for the generation of the fine clinical narrative detail but complementing this with structured tagged data that can be used to process and show the health improvements and facilitate the flow of reimbursement for better results at higher rates.