Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care

A bold new remedy for the sprawling and wasteful health care industry.

Where else but the doctors office do you have tofill out a form on a clipboard? Have you noticedthat hospital bills are almost unintelligible, exceptfor the absurdly high dollar amount? Why is it thattechnology in other industries drives prices down,but in health care its the reverse? And why, inhealth care, is the customer so often treated as amere bystanderand an ignorant one at that?

The same American medical establishmentthat saves lives and performs wondrous miraclesis also a $2.7 trillion industry in deep dysfunction.And now, with the Affordable Care Act(Obamacare), it is called on to extend full benefitsto tens of millions of newly insured. You mightthink that this would leave us with a bleak choiceeither to devote more of our national budget tohealth care or to make do with less of it. But theresanother path.

In this provocative book, Jonathan Bush,cofounder and CEO of athenahealth, calls for arevolution in health care to give customers morechoices, freedom, power, and information, andat far lower prices. With humor and a tell-it-likeit-is style, he picks up insights and ideas from hisdays as an ambulance driver in New Orleans,an army medic, and an entrepreneur launching abirthing start-up in San Diego. In struggling to savethat dying business, Bushs team created a softwareprogram that eventually became athenahealth, acloud-based services company that handles electronicmedical records, billing, and patient communicationsfor more than fifty thousand medicalproviders nationwide.

Bush calls for disruption of the status quothrough new business models, new payment models,and new technologies that give patients morecontrol of their care and enhance the physicianpatientexperience. He shows how this is alreadyhappening. From birthing centers in Florida tourgent care centers in West Virginia, upstarts aredisrupting health care by focusing on efficiency,innovation, and customer service. Bush offers avision and plan for change while bringing a breakthroughperspective to the debates surroundingObamacare.

Youll learn how:

Well-intended government regulations prop upoverpriced incumbents and slow the pace ofinnovation.
Focused, profit-driven disrupters are chippingaway at the dominance of hospitals by offeringroutine procedures at lower cost.
Scrappy digital start-ups are equipping providersand patients with new apps and technologiesto access medical data and take control of care.
Making informed choices about the care wereceive and pay for will enable a more humaneand satisfying health care system to emerge.

Bushs plan calls for Americans not only to demandmore from providers but also to accept more responsibilityfor our health, to weigh risks and make hardchoicesin short, to take back control of an industrythat is central to our lives and our economy.