Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush: If I Were a Hospital CIO…

Jonathan Bush, the forever loquacious, occasionally foul-mouthed and mostly unscripted CEO of cloud EHR company athenahealth, got the audience cracking up at the annual Stanford Medicine X conference in Palo Alto, California when he took the stage, declaring: “Shit, I have nothing visceral or profound for you.”

He was referring to the unenviable position of having to follow the moving presentations of patients and artists that preceded his keynote on Saturday. This handicap notwithstanding, Bush managed to inform and entertain the audience with his tech-enabled vision for healthcare. Later, in an interview with MedCity News, he talked about the future of information exchange and electronic health records. Here’s a slightly edited version of the conversation.

MedCity: If you were a hospital CIO, what would you demand of EHR vendors.

Bush: I don’t believe there should be EHR vendors. I believe records should be national networks like cable companies. I think if I were a CIO, I would sign on to a national network like athenahealth and I would not attempt to build my own biosphere of clinical information...