Knowing When To Change Course Can Make All The Difference In Improving Health Care

It’s tough to change, especially when you believe in what you’re already doing.

Ask entrepreneurs in any field and they’ll likely admit that they get so wrapped up and committed to carrying out the founding mission of their business that it’s easy for them to lose perspective on whether that mission still makes sense as the world changes around them.

That’s especially true in the health care sector in the U.S., where centuries of fee-for-service models have left us with providers and payors focused on managing businesses that don’t have ensuring patients’ health as the primary driver of value.

Ed Park’s dilemma at the turn of the last century wasn’t quite so grand, but he and other leaders of Athena Women’s Health in San Diego knew they had to completely change their business if they wanted to have any chance of making health care better. Athena — now athenahealth, Inc. — began as a premium birthing center in 1997 and quickly earned a good reputation among expectant mothers in the San Diego community.

Too good, in fact, and customers joining and then leaving insurance pools that offered coverage for Athena’s pricey services created an imbalance in the market that made the company unattractive to insurers pretty quickly.

That meant Park, who was working as a software developer among many other roles in the young company, and the rest of the team had to make some changes. Insurance companies opting to not carry them in their networks made it tough to ensure their cash flow, which will cripple any business fairly quickly.

What they settled on was creating a practice management platform that streamlined and simplified the operation of medical providers that were clogged with mountains of redundant paperwork, and had no easy way to go digital.

Their bet was a smart one and the rebranded athenahealth quickly set itself apart in the world of medical billing before gradually expanding into other services including information management and most other facets of health care operations. Now traded on the Nasdaq, the company has more than 80,000 providers on its platform and by some estimates helps manage 10 percent of the U.S. health care economy.

Park, who served in several top executive positions in the company before moving to a board seat recently, makes a point of saying that athenahealth is not a software company.

Instead its “product” is delivering favorable results for the providers who subscribe to its service and need their practices to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.

That “tell us what you want and we’ll make it happen” commitment is a change in the health care technology world, where selling a software package or service line is the more traditional goal. Its focus on improving the flow and management of health care information has made it a rising star in the health tech world, and made it an attractive anchor tenant for Austin’s redevelopment of the Seaholm Power Plant downtown.

Park said committing to the company’s dramatic pivot 18 years ago was an agonizing decision for he and other company founders, but it was clearly the right one.

As Austin as a whole and the Dell Medical School work to gradually shift the local health care system to one that is based around keeping people healthy instead of billing for services, there are bound to be some bumps and tough decisions ahead.

But you succeed when your mission is to keep people healthy and happy above all else. With that as a goal, the path eventually makes itself apparent.