Left to right, MedCity News’ Neil Versel prepares to interview athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and Dr. Zubin “ZDoggMD” Damania at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas.
Ever feel overmatched? That’s how I felt at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas last week when I did a video — streamed live online by HealthIT.TV — with athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush and Dr. Zubin “ZDoggMD” Damania.
Filmed by Nate DiNiro of HealthIT.TV and consulting firm VivaPhi, the interview took place at the Marquee Nightclub at the swank Cosmopolitan hotel-casino just before athenahealth’s annual HIMSS party.
If ever an interview didn’t need a host, this was the time, at least since the untimely death of the great Robin Williams.
Despite the hijinks, Bush and Damania did manage to say some useful things in the 13-minute interview posted below.
Bush acknowledged the fact that there wasn’t much substance behind the pledge that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced at HIMSS. Athenahealth was one of nearly 50 vendors, health systems and associations to agree to provide wider consumer access to health data, avoid information blocking and adopt federally recognized interoperability standards.
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The pledge made news for sure, but it didn’t contain any timeline or penalties for nonadherence.
“Maximum Leader has told us that we would either disappear in the night or that we would voluntarily pledge our loyalty and that we would quelch [sic] information blocking,” Bush said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “I was dying to not sign the pledge so I could bravely stand in front of the tank,” he added. “But the pledge was so vanilla.”
He also was lukewarm on the CommonWell Health Alliance, an interoperability project that athenahealth also participates in.
“I think it will never grow past a patient-identifier key, maybe some security-privacy permissions. It will never develop fully into a record, or even problems, meds and allergies,” Bush said, likening CommonWell to a child that has moved beyond its infancy, but isn’t quite mature yet.
That said, he noted that patient ID, privacy and security are important parts of the overall picture. If CommonWell accomplishes those things, then it will be a productive member of the health IT society, Bush said.
After Bush mentioned the Wendy’s fast-food chain, Damania interjected: “Where’s the beef?”
Bush said that health IT has been “empty carbs” without much meat. The beef is cloud-based services, Bush said, which, he noted, even ex-Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman has embraced.
Bush and Damania together have been pushing the message, “Let doctors be doctors.” It’s a battle against poorly designed electronic health records.
How bad are some EHRs? Damania suggested that physician satisfaction may have gone up during the 10 days the IT system was offline at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles last month.
Oh, yeah, there were more than a few light moments.
“Most of my information blocking relates to my children, and even that really fails quickly,” Bush said after discussing the interoperability pledge.
At about 5:10, Damania took a selfie of us, which I don’t believe he’s posted anywhere yet. This was a few minutes after he dropped the the word “asymptote,” which, for those of us who forgot high-school geometry, is the line that a curve approaches as both head toward infinity. (I had to look that up.)
Take a gander, then offer your comments below.
Photo: Twitter user Holly S Spring
