Today’s guest is Paul Brient, Chief Product Officer at Athenaheallth, a $17 billion EHR with more than 170,000 clinicians on its network. Paul has spent his entire career getting doctors to actually love the technology they use, from running PatientKeeper for 17 years, to now leading Athena’s push to build an AI native EHR.
We start with the origins of the physician friction problem, why doctors adopted robotic surgery overnight but fought the EHR for two decades, and how Meaningful Use turned the highest paid people in the hospital into data entry clerks. From there, Paul walks through the structural misalignment in healthcare software, where the person who builds the product, pays for it, and uses it are three different people, and why Athena’s practice level model works differently. We also get into payers, which Paul argues are the most misunderstood players in the system, and how Athena’s Moment of Care product brings payer intelligence to the point of care in real time. And finally, the AI native EHR itself, why Paul believes the original EHR was a mistake of metaphor built around a paper chart, and why he thinks this is finally the moment doctors will actually love their software.