Consider it more wondering aloud than anything close to an official announcement, but athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush publicly mused Wednesday whether Epocrates might be more successful “outside of my management sphere.”
Bush was keynoting the closing session of the National Healthcare Innovation Summit in Chicago when he offered up that line. In a brief conversation afterwards as Bush hustled out the door to catch a flight, he said that perhaps it might be time for the maker of mobile reference tools for healthcare professionals not to have direct reporting responsibilities to the athenahealth boss.
Bush suggested that the close ties to athenahealth were hurting growth opportunities for Epocrates, which the latter company bought in 2013 for $293 million. He agreed with an assessment that customers of athenahealth’s competitors could be shying away from Epocrates, similar to what health IT giant Cerner experienced when it owned clinical decision support content developer Zynx Health.
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Cerner bought Zynx in 2002 from Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but sold it at a loss to publishing company Hearst Business Media two years later. Potential Zynx customers had been left with the impression, true or not, that the clinical decision support company was too closely tied to Cerner.
Epocrates, however, is not for sale, Bush added.
During his lively keynote, Bush chided the health IT industry for its lack of innovation and for “trying to fit Fiji bottles into round cup holders” with some of its products. “We sort of have a market, but it’s kind of like the North Korean market for haircuts,” with just a handful of real options, he joked.
He said that vendors and many large health systems were actually working on “intraoperability” within institutions, not interoperability across the whole healthcare continuum. “HL7 was designed to tie together different departments of a hospital,” Bush said, referring to the Health Level Seven International communication standards that are ingrained in Meaningful Use regulations.
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The late Steve Jobs was lionized in both life and in death, Bush noted, but Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985 for not selling enough computers. Apple never did overtake Microsoft as the leading provider of computer operating systems, and even though retired Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was donating billions of dollars to save lives all over the world, “We were loving Steve Jobs for making a sport out of making employees cry,” Bush said.
Those employees may have been overworked, but they were disrupting the world by putting computing where computers weren’t, such as in the iPod, which debuted in 2001, a year after Jobs reclaimed the top job at Apple. He of course went on to create the template for the modern smartphone and touchscreen tablet.
Healthcare could use more of that type of thinking, Bush suggested.
