Health IT

Athenahealth seeks to ‘unbreak’ healthcare with the help of humor

To launch Unbreak Healthcare, athenahealth released four TV commercial-style videos that poke fun at legacy electronic health records companies and at government policy.

Few people would argue that healthcare is broken. Where they differ is how to fix it.

Health IT vendor athenahealth has its ideas, and wants to laugh at “the absurdity of the system,” as Chief Marketing Officer Tim O’Brien put it in a blog post Wednesday to kick off the company’s Unbreak Healthcare campaign.

Despite the name, Unbreak Healthcare isn’t intended to fix things by itself. Watertown, Massachusetts-based athenahealth has other methods for doing that, including its cloud focus and its More Disruption Please startup accelerator. (The latter has been controversial.)

It’s more about sparking a conversation. “Today marks the beginning of our new campaign to jolt the industry into experiencing what is broken in healthcare. The issues we’ll tackle are topical and for many, painfully familiar,” O’Brien wrote.

To launch Unbreak Healthcare, athenahealth released four TV commercial-style videos that poke fun at legacy electronic health records companies and at government policy.

There’s no doubt Epic Systems is one of the villains in this story. O’Brien’s blog post links to a May 17 Boston Globe story about “frustration” at Partners HealthCare from switching to Epic.

There seems to be a bit of a resemblance between one of the actors in the first video and Epic CEO Judith Faulkner, too. That’s probably not a coincidence.

Screenshot 2016-06-01 17.50.28

Athenahealth video

Judy Faulkner HIMSS15

Judith Faulkner

Meaningful Use is a target in the final video, but, even though athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush is a cousin of President George W. Bush, the Obama administration doesn’t get the full blame. “Remember when we pushed the software back in ’04?” asked one aide to the current president, who took office in 2009.

Really, though, the culprit, according to athenahealth, is EHR software. And that’s not a new theme for the cloud-services provider. Back at the 2013 HIMSS conference in New Orleans, athenahealth staged a jazz funeral for software.

The company will augment the campaign with social media and with its recently launched online publication, athenaInsight. Humor seems to be the star, though. Note that Bush included the #funnyordie hashtag in his tweet introducing Unbreak Healthcare.

 

Shares0
Shares0