Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joe Graves, CIO of Stratus (Part 2)

SM: So, tell me more. Here’s an interesting set of discussions that came out of my conversation with Jared, which [included] looking at the next decade. In the current scenario, his point of view is that there is about 60% of IT work, which is commodity work done in maintenance, backups, all sorts of IT

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Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I guess, what I’m trying to understand is – one of the case studies I know inside out is the Athenahealth story. Their business model is actually very simple. They work on behalf of the physicians, and they have all these rules engines for coding and everything, and they do collections on behalf

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Deal Radar 2010: Avisena

Avisena provides revenue cycle management (RCM) technology and services to medical practices à la athenahealth. The Avisena business model combines proprietary practice management technology delivered through the Web with a back-office service organization staffed with a team who manage collections and help physicians to better understand and improve their revenue cycles.

Promising athenahealth

In a season in which so many companies are producing disappointing results, gems like athenahealth still exist. athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) is a leading provider for the healthcare industry’s billing and practice management solutions. athenahealth just completed its first year as a public company. I recently spoke with Jonathan Bush, athenahealth’s CEO. You can read the interview here.

Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush (Part 7)

SM: How will all of the political drama affect visibility of healthcare IT? Will it just result in the government’s funneling money into things that do not have an impact? JB: We have been hard at work bringing about the death of the old-fashioned software companies that dominate healthcare IT. Their business models and companies

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Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush (Part 6)

SM: Do you plan to implement technologies like knowledge bases, automated web self services, and other similar systems? JB: Bingo. The first thing you do in healthcare is solve existing problems. Once you have the solution implemented, then you can start asking how to improve the solution, and you do that on your own time.

Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush (Part 5)

SM: Last year you were a $140 million company, correct? JB: Correct. The fourth quarter’s revenue rate was 47% higher than the fourth quarter of the year prior. You can imagine things are continuing to grow.

Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush (Part 4)

SM: You have innovated a rules engine that drives claims filing, which I am assuming has a bunch of codes and other data you have to file against for the claims to be processed. Would you classify what you have done as an expert system? JB: An expert system intends to imply artificial intelligence whereas

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