One wishes that when G W Bush pushes healthcare initiatives, no members of his extended family profited by his doing so. On the one hand, you could say that it's sure nice that there are enterprising individuals who can make money from, for example, offering healthcare services online to medical professionals-on the other, you can question why Bush so tireless pushes these types of programs that fatten the wallets of his kinfolk.
Last night while I was reading about Alberto Gonzales involvement with the anti-trust lawsuit by Medical Supply Chain against Novation, I ran across this bit about Jonathan Bush's company Athenacare. Jonathan Bush is G W Bush's cousin- son of Jonathan Bush of the Riggs Bank Scandal, brother to Billy Bush on entertainment teevee. (You remember the Riggs Bank scandal, right? That involved Jonathan Bush being CEO of Riggs Bank and accused of offering money laundering to the Saudis? and to Pinochet?) from the NYTimes
President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering
But I digress. Back to healthcare initiatives on the web.
Let's say that you go in to your doctor or dentist for routine medical care. You fill out your papers, your history, etc and you assume that your information is staying with YOUR doctor. Right? Not if your doctor has chosen to use a service like Athenacare. From their website.
Can I buy athenahealth software?
athenahealth Response: We do not sell our software as a separate, stand-alone product.
Benefit to You: athenahealth provides continuous, real-time, workflow automation solutions. We use our state-of-the-art tools to deliver these services through an ASP (application service provider) model.
What data is migrated from our old system and what happens to our old A/R?
athenahealth Response: athenahealth imports patient schedules and patient demographic data where necessary. We import patient insurance information only if your medical group is confident that the information you currently have is accurate.
Benefit to You: Our goal is to give you clean information so that you begin accurate information to generate clean claims. We do not import old accounts receivable records as this would impair the ability to produce clean, clear and meaningful reporting. You may temporarily maintain your old system to resolve unpaid claims.
So, your doctor wouldn't be able to buy software to run locally but would be uploading YOUR information to Athenacare, which apparently is able to aggregate and use this information to make all types of reports. This might be totally fine with you, but were you ASKED and had to sign a form that it was all right to have YOUR information uploaded to another site to be used by another company? What happens to this data? Again, from their website, if the doctor uses Athena Enterprise.
Available as an add-on module to the athenaCollectorSM service offering, athenaEnterprise functionality saves network enterprises time and money on staffing, coordination and administration by allowing them to:
The Athena Collector is apparently a mechanism to help doctors collect payments, such as Medicare (or perhaps from recalcitrant patients).
- Create a Master Patient Index to share pertinent patient data across multiple athenaNet
