Dive Brief:
- Healthcare is catching up with the digital world and Jonathan Bush, CEO, Athenahealth says there will be a healthcare Internet in five years.
- Digital adoption has been slow due to outdated technology and concerns for patient privacy, Bush told CNBC in an interview. There have been huge data breaches this year, including one at Anthem that put 80 million records at risk, and one last week at UCLA Health that may have affected 4.5 million patient records.
- Supreme Court rulings in support of the Affordable Care Act, Bush said, will lead to "new, more innovative ways to digitally deliver health."
Dive Insight:
The company provides cloud-based record keeping and billing for 65,000 physicians and 62 million patients, and Bush agrees that privacy "is a big deal." He adds that the healthcare sector has to find the right balance between data accessibility and safety.
"You can make it totally safe ...and totally useless to people, so we don't want that," he said.
The recent Obamacare ruling by the Supreme Court, Bush states, has provided "certainty" for healthcare providers, which should help boost business. This position was echoed in a previous Healthcare Dive article where industry analysts said that now the uncertainty of an adverse ruling is gone, major payer mergers will happen quickly. Just this past month, Anthem agreed to acquire Cigna for $54 billion, and Aetna moved to buy Humana for $37 billion.