Jonathan Bush
A standard profile of Jonathan Bush would emphasize his high tech bona fides. This is not that profile.
We can do no better than quote Brandon Hull, the lead director of the first company Bush founded, athenahealth.
“With Jonathan’s personality,” Hull told Fortune in 2014, “lots of people misjudge him because of his whole unplugged, zany demeanor. But he’s an incredibly thoughtful person…I say no [to him] all the time, but often he winds up being right, and he’ll say, ‘I told you so. Now can we do it?’”
When Jonathan was an undergrad at Wesleyan University, his uncle announced that the U.S. would be launching Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Jonathan enlisted “the day the bombers flew,” and served as a combat medic in the U.S. Army. “I had this huge term paper due,” he jokes.
Jonathan aspired to become a doctor, and a physician friend recommended that he familiarize himself with the less glamorous aspects of medicine. So, after his Army stint, Jonathan signed up to become an emergency medical technician in New Orleans, because, he reasoned, “the closest thing to being a doctor is driving an ambulance in a busy city.”
Driving ambulances gave Jonathan insight into what was wrong with American health care. “In the case of emergency medicine, if you don’t treat, it’s too late,” he once told Information Week. “They had to dispense with the guilt: the idea that the doctor was the only person who could do certain things…One guy in my platoon had recently been eating out of a dumpster,” but was serving as an Army medic like Jonathan after ten weeks of intensive training. “Meanwhile, we pay outrageous sums of money to have doctors dumb themselves down into doing things that could easily be delegated.”
After college, Jonathan went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, as a member of its Managed Care Strategy Group, and then to Harvard Business School. After graduating, he and a Booz Allen colleague, Todd Park, had the bright idea of building Athena Women’s Health, a women’s health and birthing clinic in San Diego. The idea was to help women deliver babies in a specialized, high-quality setting at a fraction of the price that incumbent hospitals were charging.
Unfortunately, the incumbent hospitals successfully fought off the threat from Jonathan and Todd’s startup. But there was a silver lining to the cloud.
Todd’s brother, Ed Park, had developed sophisticated software to help Athena nagivate the complex world of medical billing. That software ended up becoming the seed for athenahealth, a company whose mission is to bring the opportunities and innovation of the internet to health care.
In 2014, Jonathan published his reformist manifesto, Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care. Clayton Christensen, the legendary apostle of disruptive innovation at Harvard, called it “one of the most important and engaging books about health care I have ever read,” because it focuses on “the people who occupy the last wagon in health care…the patients who don’t have access to the best care.”
“Few are more persuasive—and outspoken—about the need to repair our healthcare system,” opined Fortune in a list of the “34 Leaders Who Are Changing Healthcare.”
And Jonathan has used every avenue of persuasion available to him. Athenahealth once commissioned a spoof of a Jay-Z video to rally doctors and health IT nerds against our antiquated approach to electronic health records.
After leaving athenahealth, Jonathan joined Firefly Health, a startup focused on telemedicine and virtual primary care, as its Executive Chairman. He has also founded Zus Health, a next-generation health IT platform.
Jonathan is also Chairman of FREOPP’s Board of Directors, where he shares with us his front-line perspective on how technological innovation can expand opportunity to those who least have it. “In an era when up is down and right is left, it gives me great joy to support FREOPP,” he says, “an institution that is fact-based and passionate about its good work.”
