ORLANDO – As HIMSS24 kicks off this week, with preconference forums buzzing all-day Monday, and the show floor set to open at 10 a.m., after the opening keynote on Tuesday, more than 1,100 exhibitors, large and small, are getting their booths in shape to showcase their newest health IT products and strategies.

Among them is one company that's been coming to the global conference about as long as any other in the exhibit hall: athenahealth.

The anchor exhibitor this year is "really focusing on making sure that the entire marketplace understands our commitment to kind of curing the complexity that is healthcare, whether that is through technology innovation, whether that's through integrated data or whether that's through carefully curated partnerships across the ecosystem," says Jessica Sweeney-Platt, vice president, research and Editorial Strategy at athenahealth.

"We're going to be highlighting a lot of different ways in which this combination of technology, data and making sure that all of the different players in the ecosystem can connect and talk to one another is going to make life simpler for the practices and the clinicians that we serve."

Provider experience has been a crucial healthcare imperative in recent years – starting, arguably, a decade ago, when the Institute for Healthcare Improvement updated its famed Triple Aim to the Quadruple Aim, "adding the goal of improving the work life of health care providers, including clinicians and staff."

The past four years – marked by a world-disrupting pandemic that stretched health systems and their clinicians to the breaking point – have only exacerbated the burden and burnout felt by the provider workforce. But even without that added challenge, so many of the pain points felt by docs and nurses have to do with basic problems of interoperability, data governance, workflow and electronic health record design.

This past month, athenahealth published its third Physician Sentiment Survey. Its headline: "Almost All U.S. Physicians Surveyed Feel Burned Out on a Regular Basis, with Many Having Considered Career Change."

"The numbers were not heartening, to put it mildly," said Sweeney-Platt. "About 94% of [physicians] agreed that getting the right data at the right time is one of their top priorities. And yet a majority of them are feeling so overburdened by the amount of information that's coming at them through all of these different sources that it raises their stress levels and it's a significant contributor to burnout."

That's why athenahealth is prioritizing "better-curated information flows," and will be talking about it in a big way at HIMSS24, she said. "Probably the best example of that is a phrase we are using called 'experiential interoperability.'

"It's not enough just to kind of open up the pipes in healthcare and increase the volume of information," Sweeney-Platt explained. "The problem that we have in healthcare today is not that we don't have enough information – it's that we don't have enough insight. So experiential interoperability is about making the right information available at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right place in a person's workflow."

Toward that goal, athenahealth will be previewing a new feature at HIMSS24 called ChartSync, which can consolidate and deduplicate incoming data, putting it into common format before surfacing it within a clinician's workflow.

"It's essentially a feature that allows users of different electronic health records to see an integrated view of a patient's information," she said. "So if you're a surgeon and you're operating on a patient in a hospital that's on one system, and your office is using a different system, you'll be able to see an integrated view of that patient's information across both of those EHRs. We'll be previewing that at HIMSS and doing a broader rollout of that across the remainder of the year."

Among other priorities in Orlando, the company (which was a founding member of the CommonWell Health Alliance 11 years ago at HIMSS13) will also be laser focused on health data exchange this year. CommonWell was approved this past year to participate in TEFCA as a Qualified Health Information Network.

"We're going to be in the Interoperability Showcase as part of a CommonWell demonstration," said Sweeney-Platt. "We're still very committed to that partnership, and we were one of its earliest proponents, and so we will be showcasing that in the interoperability showcase with them."

But it probably won't surprise you to know that another main focus for athenahealth will involve those two letters that are so often spoken together nowadays.

"Everyone is talking about AI, and we are no different from everyone else," she said. "We know that this is important to our customers."

It's important, of course, because for all the hopes being pinned on AI's transformative potential, so much of its appeal is what it can already accomplish, in perhaps more modest ways, for the providers in the here and now. Automation and "small AI" tweaks have huge potential to make workflows and other clinical processes more efficient and effective.

Sweeney-Platt says about 83% of the physicians polled for the survey mentioned above say that "they think that AI can eventually reduce a lot of the problems facing them. But they're not seeing a lot of that yet.

"And so we have a couple of our executives – our chief medical officer, Dr. Nele Jessel, and our senior data architect, Heather Lane – are going to be doing a presentation on the lessons that we've learned from the seven-plus years that we have been developing artificial intelligence and machine learning models at athenahealth.

"As our chief product officer is very fond of saying we didn't just discover AI when ChatGPT was released a year and a half ago. We've been integrating these capabilities in different capacities, into our products, for a really long time. And Heather and Nele will be talking about that in their presentation. The lessons that we've learned from some of those early efforts."

One of the things the company will be highlighting at its booth is "how the athenaOne experience overall is a simplified one for the typical user – and AI is a big part of that story. It's kind of been in the background in our products for a while. It's been focused on things like capturing information from insurance cards and automating some of the manual work that goes on in selecting insurance packages. It's been focused on things like prioritizing what the clinician sees in his or her inbox. So it's not some of the bigger, flashier things, but it's been an ongoing commitment of ours for a number of years."

Dr. Jessel in particular is "passionate" about the myriad ways AI can help improve healthcare. "She'll be talking a lot about now that AI really is becoming a little bit more front and center, a lot more front and center – it's entering the patient experience; it's entering the direct clinician experience – we have to be super careful about testing and learning and making sure that any consequences that come from using that kind of technology are intended consequences, not unintended consequences."

Patient and provider experience, after all, are "so interconnected, " said Sweeney-Platt. "I don't believe you can have a great patient experience unless you also have a great clinician experience. Those two things are very tightly woven together."

This past year at HIMSS23, the company debuted its athenaPatient app, a freestanding mobile app designed to provide "a true consumer-grade experience for both patients and clinicians," she said. "We've had more than a million downloads of that since we launched it about a year ago. So that will be on display in our booth as well.

"We've also made some significant advances over the last year in terms of patient scheduling and improving the scheduling experience for both the user inside the clinic as well as for the patient," she added. "Because again, if you can't get access to the physician, if the schedule isn't open and flexible enough, if you can't get access to the schedule, then you can't have any kind of an experience."

And new partnerships will also be highlighted at athenahealth's booth on the show floor.

"One of our directors of product is going to be demonstrating how we've worked with Humana and Availity to develop an end to end electronic prior auth process. It's part of the commitment to automate work for practices and exchanges. Again, like, not something that we've done on our own. It's very much in partnership.

"And we're going to be unveiling a case study with Surescripts talking about how our partnership has both improved medication adherence and it's delivered millions of dollars in cost savings."

And, as always, the cloud-based IT pioneer – "we were cloud before cloud was cool," Sweeney-Platt jokes – will have a significant presence in its booth for our athenahealth Marketplace, which is up to about 470 partners, she says.

"We're always looking for new companies to apply to join the marketplace. So we'll have a lot of opportunities for folks to come and talk to us about integrating their solutions with athenaOne. It's all part of making sure that the ecosystem is as densely connected as we can possibly make it."

Athenahealth is in Booth #3740 at HIMSS24.