Athenahealth's More Disruption Please initiative may serve the company's bottom line, but it's heart is more subversive: to dismantle the healthcare system as it exists today. And the company is doing it one person at a time.
Steven Madreperla, an ophthalmologist practicing in New Jersey, never pictured himself an inventor, never mind a disruptive innovator. But, he found himself to be both.
In 2011, the MD with a PhD in neuroscience created and introduced his physician office drug inventory system (PODIS) in his retina practice. A year later, he and his product were recruited to athenahealth's More Disruption Please initiative.
"I certainly didn't enter into it thinking that that was something I was doing," he said with a chuckle. "If people look at a process and they see inefficiencies in the process, I think it's a natural tendency of humans to want to do it better and more efficiently and that leads people to create new ways of doing things."
Madreperla's PODIS is not something brand spanking new, he pointed out. Like many innovations, it brings together a number of already-available technologies and puts them together in a way that solves a problem for physician practices.
Madreperla's had been a customer of athenahealth for a number of years when he introduced PODIS to the practice. His innovation caught the attention of Kyle Armbrester, athenahealth's director of business development. It is just the sort of thing the cloud-based practice management and business services company is looking for, Armbrester said, for its More Disruption Please (MDP) initiative.
MDP began about a year ago with the idea that connecting innovators and their innovations to users and capital would spur needed change in the healthcare industry.
"If we can help people see healthcare as a place where they can build and grow a company and be successful and make an impact and help change outcomes: that's our number one goal," said Armbrester. "We want to spur innovation here and we're going to put capital and we're going to put resources behind making that happen."
Still in its formative stages, the MDP initiative numbers about 1,000 basic-level members and about 15 partner members. Partner members are required to sign a contract with athenahealth in exchange for athenahealth's full support, but basic-level membership doesn't require a contract with the company. Innovators participating at the basic level can take advantage of MDP's programming and networking events.
Athenahealth doesn't ask for a fee from partners but it does require them to offer a discount to its clients and allow athenahealth to measure whether the partners' products are doing for its clients what was promised.
"Our goal is to provide fertilizer, equipment, moral support, legislative support to get those disruptive businesses going - partly 'cause they'll tear down the busted ones, but partly because they'll actually cause the busted ones to grow up and start looking towards the future," said Jonathan Bush, athenahealth's founder and CEO.
Bush believes athenahealth's role as a corporation is as much about disrupting the establishment of the healthcare industry as it is making money - and the two often go hand-in-hand.
"Disruption of the establishment is as fundamental to life as birth," Bush said.
"This is the problem with healthcare: We evaluate it against what it is, not what it could be. And that's what disruptors do. They think randomly, wantonly, without peer-reviewed research, right out of their ass they come up with things that they want healthcare to be and they throw it against the wall and some wacky one - remember the Apple ad 'here's to the crazy ones'? - some crazy one buys it and then two and then four and then they're not the crazy ones any more. Then, (they) hopefully get mature enough that somebody disrupts (them)."
Bush is convinced that sometime in the not-too-distant future, the big health systems and hospitals and insurers that are market dominators today will collapse in a "black swan event" and it is athenahealth's mission to make sure it has helped disruptive innovators to survive and thrive enough to be able to pick up the pieces when that happens.
"When the established institutions crash, the doctors won't evaporate," Bush said. "They'll still be there. They'll still have their hands and their brains and their stethoscopes. It's just a question of what corporate structure they wrap around.
"What we need is lots of little deaths. Little disruptions. Lots of little players so that when they die they won't be such a big feature of our lives. If the Sisters of Agony emergency (department) closes but there's already two urgent care centers within a mile who have already taken 80 percent of the volume - meh. Whereas if nobody knows where they'll go, oh boy."