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Family members need information, whether they are visiting an Athena health care center or at home, that gives them the security of knowing their loved one is cared for with compassion and dignity.

The emotional part was through Jonathan’s wife, Sarah.

A system has better incentives for provider and provides better funding for providers to do population health management.

Interesting but clearly a guy with no real knowledge of this market and what’s really happening out there. Athena has a huge advantage in affordability of it’s web-based platform and it’s incredible word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Athena has equipped itself for a guerilla marketing campaign aimed at individual practitioners.

Outsourcing in a secure environment is here to stay and the market is going to change dramatically for the small practitioner in healthcare. Athena’s biggest obstacle will be execution, as it is not just software, it’s billing. They started calling themselves Athenistas and to this day everyone at athena calls themselves an Athenista.

There’s no doubt athena provides a valuable service especially since they offshore to India, but let’s not go overboard with the “ONE and ONLY” stuff, I’ve seen practices leave athena too to try to do it better in-house or with another billing company. I think that right now, and for the foreseeable future, we’re in the “get doctors paid” business, but eventually that business will build itself into a network upon which athena can do more things that are really useful and are additional excellent lines of business as well. Businesses like athena are built through collective effort.

I actually don’t know enough about the history of Apple to know whether that’s a direct analogy or not. He’s Yin to my Yang and we have collectively co-led and co-built athena from the very beginning. Even after those transactions all go through, I still hold 900,000 shares of athena stock. I will hold a lot of stock athena for a really long time and continue to a very active board member and godfather to athena. Our group uses athena and while it is very expensive, you certainly get a lot for the money. It is easy to tell the time and effort they put into the “experience” to make athena what it is today. I think that athena is a great example of a change that’s helpful that couldn’t have been done by any one person, that was engineered by a group of really committed people. The reason why I was so confident that athena would continue to rock the house even though I’m not there day to day is because that group of people is still here and bringing on wave after wave of new people who are incredible to perpetuate the beneficial change that we’ve gotten going in our corner of the world here. One of the best parts of athena has been the privilege with that incredible group of people. What was interesting, when I initially started, people gave me all kinds of ideas: athena starting a data business, athena going international, athena doing all kinds of things, athena Intergalactic. People can watch and see if I dump my 900,000 shares or not, but I thought I might communicate more expeditiously and say that that was behind my recent sales and that’s what my plans are going forward with athena. I’m thinking about long term strategy, networking across the industry, speaking on behalf of athena at conferences, hosting brown bag lunches with our employees, starting an athenahealth Foundation, which Jonathan and I are going to start funded by $1 million each of our own money, and just taking a godfather/co-founder role and a board role, and then moving to California. I feel that athena is now strong enough to be an institution to withstand the loss of anyone day to day. We decided to start a company together and started athena in 1997 as an obstetrics physician practice management company. We morphed athena into that, raised venture capital, and then took the company out from there.

Now that we are all up to date with the genius behind Athena Software and make no mistake that it is software you can access via the web. healthcare and a long-term, 10-year vision for athena. There’s a long list of people that deserve to have their name in lights, not just me and Jonathan, a long list of people, without whom athena’s success would not be possible. I’m actually now functioning as a very active athena board member, functioning as a godfather/co-founder, visiting athena every other month.