Bush ’93 Offers a Prescription to Fix Hospitals

Jonathan Bush ’93, CEO of athenahealth and author of Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care, writes in The Boston Globe magazine about the problem with the business model of today’s hospitals, and offers a prescription for change.

Currently, he writes, “The business model of practically every hospital is predicated on mysterious and outrageous charges that someone else, either an insurance company or the government, will eventually pay or haggle down. There is almost no consideration of the patient as customer, someone who could conceivably compare prices and service and value. In our convoluted system, the insurance company is the customer and the patient is a widget to be processed, administered and billed for.”

The result? A system that is threatening to bankrupt our economy. But Bush offers a glimmer of hope:

“From the point of view of an entrepreneur, this scene is dripping with potential. All you have to do is to bite off a chunk of that hospital business, reduce the overhead, and offer routine services at reasonable rates. In a market economy, as prices become transparent and shoppers entertain more choices, the big hospitals will increasingly struggle to draw business. And these battles are already underway.”

Read more here.