athenahealth Leadership Forum Initiative Launched to Promote Inspired, Disruptive Leadership in Health Care

athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health record (EHR), and care coordination services to medical groups, today announced the launch of a new initiative focused on the promotion of inspired, disruptive leadership in health care. The athenahealth Leadership Forum comprises a periodic series of invitation-only leadership institutes and a new website and online community, open to all medical enterprise leaders, featuring exclusive Harvard Business Review (HBR) content and original contributions from top Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty. The Forum website can be found at http://healthleadershipforum.com.

As health care moves through a period of dramatic change and upheaval, enterprise leaders of hospitals and health systems are consumed by challenges ranging from achieving Meaningful Use and navigating new risk-based payment programs to preparing for ICD-10. While there are vast array of competing technology solutions and services to support these transitions there are few resources focused on connecting leaders and equipping them with the ideas and inspiration to lead through this period of massive change. The Leadership Forum website offers:

• Original, provocative articles from top Harvard Business School faculty on topics ranging from “Learning from Failure” to “Leading in Ongoing Turbulence.”
• Free articles from the Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business School cases, hand-picked for their application to today’s leadership challenges.
• Curated daily feeds of topically relevant posts from the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.
• Opportunities for members to join the discussion and connect with other enterprise leaders through comments, polls, and an integrated LinkedIn group.
• Notices for upcoming Leadership Institutes and information on applying to these invitation-only retreats.

Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth commented, “Leading a hospital or health systems these days is no picnic. There is no blueprint, there are no easy answers – just a bunch of constantly shifting targets. We want to bring the best ideas and inspiration to these leaders and get them to share theirs with us. Health care is in desperate need of disruption, but disruptive leaders aren’t born – they are shaped and nurtured by experience. We want to do our small part to ensure health care gets the kind of visionary leadership it deserves.”

Nancy F. Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School and Forum Faculty Chair added, “This is a moment of great significance for health care, the single most important sector in the United States. The stakes are very high, not only for our time but for the vast future as well. In this context, effective leadership has never been more vital. The Forum is aimed at the heart of this imperative: to create and nurture the leaders health care deserves.”

About athenahealth

athenahealth, Inc. is a leading provider of cloud-based business services for physician practices. athenahealth's service offerings are based on proprietary web-native practice management and electronic health record (EHR) software, a continuously updated payer knowledge-base, integrated back-office service operations, and care coordination services. For more information, please visit http://www.athenahealth.com/ or call (888) 652-8200.