Founded in 1997, Athenahealth is a publicly traded American healthcare technology company that provides physician practices with proprietary cloud-based practice management and electronic health record (EHR) software, a continuously updated payer knowledge-base, integrated back-office service operations, live patient communications services, and other healthcare business services.

Athenahealth was chosen to be a TR50 company because its systems help doctors and patients with the morass of medical records and billing paperwork. The company’s key innovation is the development of cloud-based software for electronic health records and practice management.

Jonathan Bush, CEO of Athenahealth, will be the keynote speaker at the Health 2.0 Spring Fling: Matchpoint conference in Boston on May 14-15, 2012. The conference will showcase speakers focusing on the commercializing of the Health 2.0 movement, and Bush will detail his company’s rise from start-up to $2.5 billion market cap segment leader.

Interested in other Top 10 Innovative Biomedicine companies for 2012? Check them all out with the tag 2012 Biomedicine TR50.

References

1. The 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2012. Technology Review. Accessed 2012 Apr 10.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is the world’s most famous conference on the ideas that shape the world. For the past three years, there’s been a special TED just for health and medicine — TEDMED — where passionate doers and thinkers go once a year to experience the power of new ideas, hear amazing and inspiring talks, meet innovative people, and leave transformed.

The annual TEDMED conference started today. TEDMED brings together 1500 thinkers and doers from a wide array of medical and non-medical disciplines. For the next three and a half days (April 10-13) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., this uniquely diverse community will explore the ideas, innovations and challenges that will help shape the future of health and medicine for 300 million Americans … and the world.

TEDMED is hosting over 60 speakers this year, including Francis S. Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health; Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, President and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Joel Salatin, Polyface organic farmer and author; and Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor of Reuters Health.

TEDMED has no agenda and no policy prescriptions. Instead, the organization seeks to serve the nation — and the world — by creating a safe place where people with very different ideas can come together to talk, to learn and to celebrate the amazing world we live in.

The new health information technology company will develop and market an open, interoperable technology platform and innovative clinical applications focused on enabling better population health management to improve outcomes and the overall economics of health and wellness. The joint venture will combine Microsoft’s expertise in building platforms and ecosystems with GE Healthcare’s experience in clinical and administrative workflow solutions.

The as of yet unnamed new company will deliver a distinctive, open platform that will give healthcare providers and independent software vendors the ability to develop a new generation of clinical applications. The venture will develop healthcare applications on the platform using in-house developers and the platform will connect with a wide range of healthcare IT products. GE Healthcare IT will immediately be able to connect existing products to the platform, helping current customers to derive new insights.

The two companies will contribute the following intellectual property:

• Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform that brings historically disparate data together and makes it easy to identify and act on insights into clinical, financial or operational performance.
• Microsoft Vergence, a technology that brings single sign-on, context management and multi-factor authentication together on a clinical workstation.
• Microsoft expreSSO, a solution to simplify and streamline the organizational rollout of single sign-on.
• GE Healthcare eHealth, a framework for delivering clinical applications on top of a connected healthcare community. Its foundation is a portal technology that provides clinicians a web-based, simple way to view patient data from a health information exchange.
• GE Healthcare Qualibria, a clinical knowledge application environment that helps ensure that organizations can more effectively manage to the latest measures of quality and thrive in today’s performance-based world.

The long-term vision of the venture is to create new value by offering a healthcare performance management suite that includes many of these products.

Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, said:

The complementary nature of GE Healthcare’s and Microsoft’s individual expertise will drive new insights, solutions and efficiencies to further advance the two companies’ shared vision of a connected, patient-centric healthcare system. The global healthcare challenges of access, cost and quality of care delivery are creating a new focus on the performance and accountability of healthcare delivery systems –- in every country, at every level of care. This venture will demonstrate what is possible when leading companies with complementary capabilities work together to meet a common goal.

Source: Microsoft

According to Parkinson, joining Myca didn’t compromise any of his ideals and was simply a natural progression of his practice [1]:

No innovation is going to come from within the industry. It’s going to come from outside the industry. There are 47 million uninsured who have to pay cash for healthcare, and there’s another likely 40 million that are going to need supplemental insurance. That’s a significant buying power that no one is even thinking about in the healthcare industry. I’m not anti-corporate. I’m just anti-stupidcorporate. I’m very much a businessman.

Links to articles describing Parkinson were included in a past edition of Medicine 2.0 here at Highlight HEALTH 2.0. Parkinson and his unique medical practice have been the focus of a great deal of discussion over the past year, both in the news and blogosphere.

Myca and Hello Health

Myca focuses on health and wellness applications, utilizing advanced communications and mobile devices to make it easy for consumers and health experts to connect. The company is expanding from the development of a mobile health application called MyFoodPhone Nutrition, which incorporates camera phone food journaling and video feedback services, to a broader platform for delivering healthcare services.

That broader platform is a healthcare service called Hello Health. A single communications and clinical information platform developed by Myca provides a solution to three top healthcare issues: access, high-quality medical care and cost management. The system offers patient and physician interfaces that extend far beyond a traditional EMR. For a monthly fee, members can access Hello Health doctors in the clinic or at home and by IM or video chat. Sound familiar? Following in Parkinson’s medical practice model, Hello Health incorporates several technological improvements only a company with resources like Myca could provide.

Interestingly, unlike many services that focus on physician quality and offer the ability to rate doctors, Hello Health will focus on patient satisfaction. According to Parkinson [1]:

It’s not going to be a rating system for doctors. It’s going to be private information based on your effort with your patients. To me, e-Bay is the model. They have one question they ask: ‘What is your satisfaction with the seller? Positive, negative, or neutral.’ It’s as simple as that. At the end of the month, you tally them up, and take the aggregate score, and the doctor will then make more or less depending on their average score.

If doctor scores decrease, Hello Health takes a larger portion of fees collected. This is the incentive that will drive a new model of practice, one that is more effective and takes advantage of technology. In an interview last month with the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Parkinson described Hello Health as [2]:

… a neighborhood-based, Internet-enabled practice that sees you in person and communicates with you over the Internet. Patients become members for a Netflix-priced monthly fee and then pay fee for service. In-person visits, whether house call or in-office, will range from $75 to $150 cash. We will submit your claim to your insurance for you so you can be reimbursed but you pay cash up front.

As Alan Brookstone points out at CanadianEMR, complex diseases such as cancer likely won’t be as easy to manage using the Hello Health model of healthcare delivery. Nevertheless, for primary care, it streamlines service, provides accessible doctors, offers consumer convenience and may just be the next big thing in healthcare.

Hello Health should launch by the end of this month.

Additional details on Hello Health can be found on Jay Parkinson’s blog. More information on Hello Health Drs. Jay Parkinson and Sean Khozin can be found here.

References

1. Jay Parkinson Sells Out? MDNG. 2008 May 12.
2. Technodoc Jay Parkinson Says Hello to Franchising. Wall Street Journal Blog. 2008 Jun 9.