The CEO of medical IT company Athenahealth, Jonathan Bush, has a big vision for reforming and revolutionizing the health care system: harness the power of the Internet to coordinate and optimize all aspects of patient care. And even though Bush is a close relative of the presidential (and Republican) Bush family, he keeps politics–and the fight over Obamacare–out of his quest. His biggest obstacle? The health care industry’s systemic resistance to new technology and foot-dragging on innovation–in part a result of government incentives for hospitals to upgrade to costly electronic medical record systems that still don’t solve the problems they were supposed to fix. Told as a narrative profile of the wacky, fun-loving CEO Bush and his company, this story also examines the difficulty in bringing cutting-edge technology to health care (particularly to the front lines of hospitals and doctor offices), an industry that lags all others in the adoption of modern tech and web-based innovations. It also sheds light on the opaque, yet extremely competitive and essential, electronic medical records industry, as well as how much farther health care must go to function efficiently.
