A few weeks ago, we hosted an Xconomy Xchange evening featuring Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ATHN]]), and Girish Navani, his counterpart at Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks. With Pam McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants, wielding a gavel to moderate, the two competitors discussed and debated the future of health IT. You can read our summary of the Faceoff on the Future of Healthcare IT here. Now we’ve got some video.
The event took place on Sept. 29 at WilmerHale’s offices in downtown Boston, overlooking Boston harbor. Our partners at Schwartz Communications were able to lure Bush, McNamara, and a few attendees away from the view to get their takes on the subject on camera. It was a small but diverse group that (besides Bush and McNamara) included Jeff Livingstone, industry strategist for healthcare and life science at Akamai, Caleb Stowell, a medical student at Harvard Medical School, and myself.
This video, introduced by Schwartz senior vice president Helen Shik of the firm’s healthcare practice, is especially nice because it is easily navigable and allows you to select just the speakers you want to hear—skipping non-experts like me if you so choose. Thanks to the Schwartz video team for putting it together. I hope you enjoy it.
Some of my favorite takes:
—Livingstone on how the healthcare industry has been late to the cloud.
—McNamara on how technology is enabling more focus on improving the patient experience, versus its original implementation almost as an afterthought to improve back office efficiency.
—Med student Stowell on why so many doctors are slow to adopt health IT technology—and why students don’t have that problem.
—Jonathan Bush on how successful adoption of new technology comes down to one thing: “cash.”
Again, you can view the whole video here (scroll down a bit on the page after following the link).