As a boy, Bush watched Emergency! on television and was captivated by
the romance and seeming magic of saving lives. As an adult, he found the
reality of medicine to be very different: There wasn’t much humanity in
the way health care was actually delivered. Believing that he’d be
daunted by the course work required for a medical degree, he decided to
take an entrepreneurial route to improving the system. His first sense
of the opportunity came while he was driving an ambulance in New Orleans
one summer during college. Some patients with chronic disease who
couldn’t afford their medicines would repeatedly call the ambulance to
take them to a hospital where they could be stabilized. What if the
ambulance itself were outfitted with treatments for the five most common
chronic diseases and carried EMTs who were trained to use them? Those
patients could be treated in place, at a radically lower cost than what
the hospital would charge. That idea didn’t work out, and Bush moved on
to think about a network of maternity clinics. He and Todd Park drew up a
business plan at Harvard Business School—one that was “unbelievably
complicated to execute and very risky.” But in the process of pursuing
it, they created websites for the paperwork with rules that prevented
mistakes. That was the seed for athenahealth, which today supports
electronic medical records and a suite of practice management and care
coordination services, leaving doctors free to spend more time with
their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]