Athenahealth Marketplace – crowdsourcing in health care

Athenahealth, inc provides cloud-based services for health care services. It started out as a women’s health and birthing practice in San Diego, California and launched its first medical practice management system to solve reimbursement problems it incurred. Since then, Athenahealth has successfully launched products that include electronic health records, revenue cycle management, medical billing, patient engagement, care coordination, population health management.

In 2013, Athenahealth launched the “More Disruption Please” (MDP) program, a platform that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, clinicians and industry experts to discover new ways to improve healthcare. The MDP Accelerator invests in startups through the MDP program and provides the resources and customer access to help these start-ups scale up and succeed.   These start-ups partners with Athenahealth to provide solutions through the Athenahealth Marketplace. Currently the Athenahealth partners provide healthcare solutions in seven major areas, including acquisition and engagement, administrative, billing, care management, efficiency tools, medical records, and provider tools.

Through the MDP platform, Athenahealth promotes innovation and encourages new creative ways of solving health care problems. It is often very difficult for a large corporation to maintain its innovative culture. By investing in outside start-ups, Athenahealth can facilitate such creativity. Athenahealth then ensures the success of these start-ups by providing both capital and access to customers, two crucial basis for the success of a start-up. These start-ups then provide better and more diverse service to existing Athenahealth customers and help attract new customers.

MDP has successfully launched many start-ups.   One example is Grand Round Table, a Philadelphia-based health IT company that integrates electronic health records to assist healthcare huddle. Several years ago, government agencies started pushing for team “huddles” where cross-discipline patient care professionals – physicians, nurses, and staff – meet together to evaluate patient care. However arranging such huddles involved a great deal of logistics and planning. For many hospitals, the process was cumbersome and inefficient. Grand Round Table solved this problem by integrating electronic patient record system with data-driven reporting and analytics. First, providers receive “daily digest briefing” emails about patients who are scheduled to into their office the next day. Then physicians can click a link that sends them to reports that contain updates on the patient’s last visits, patient-centered clinical guidelines, and potential gaps in care. Physicians can simply check a box once a routine diagnostic testing such as a colorectal exam is done. Today, 49 primary care sites throughout the country use Grand Round Table.

Another example on the Athenahealth marketplace is OhMD, a text messaging applications company which connect physicians and patients through text messages. Often times, patients rush to the emergency room for issues that can be easily managed at home because patients do not know what to do. Today many patients have started ask and receive answers from physicians through text messaging companies like OhMD. OhMD connects directly to electronic health records through HIPAA-compliant encryption and recipient verification. Then patient can ask questions directly through the app to receive answers.

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By partnering and investing with start-ups like Grand Round Table and OhMD, Athenahealth captures value through innovative solutions.