athenahealth - Best Use of Thought Leadership in Sales

Company: athenahealth
Company Description: athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and operational results. Our expert teams build modern technology on an open, connected ecosystem, yielding insights that make a difference for our customers and their patients. Our vision is to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Nomination Category: Thought Leadership Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Use of Thought Leadership in Sales

Nomination Title: athenahealth's Data-Driven Thought Leadership Program

athenahealth partners with healthcare organizations across the care continuum to drive clinical and operational results. Our expert teams build modern technology on a single,connected network,allowing us to unlock data across the healthcare ecosystem to generate actionable insights. The quality of our data and our access to healthcare organizations of all types and sizes create a unique opportunity to detect patterns and understand what is and isn’t working in healthcare , and why.

In 2019, a new athenahealth was formed, bringing together two companies with decades of experience in healthcare technology-athenahealth, Inc. and Virence Health-under private equity ownership. Our combined technology,datainsights, expertise, and customer base give us a vast, nationwide footprint. Through our revenue cycle management, clinical record,andpatient engagement services, and the opening of our network to other partners, care settings, and providers, we seek out, and eliminate, obstacles to a smarter healthcare experience.

Key2020achievementsinclude an estimated 13% increase in annual bookings from 2019 to 2020. The company’s growth was driven by 2,700 new customers selecting athenahealth and for strong performance in client retention and satisfaction, as evidenced by client NPS scores increasing more than 50% from Q4'19 to Q4'20.

Oneexample to highlight is our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, we paused our planned marketing campaigns and pivoted to develop a content strategy that would provide value and support for the healthcare providers. We launched a COVID-19 Resource Hub, whichshared insightsthrough webinars, articles, and infographicson how healthcare organizations adaptedto meet patients’ and employees’ needs during the pandemic. We also produced interactive dashboardstracking pandemic-related trends across our network.

A more recent project from March 2021 identified trends in the adoption of virtual care, culling data from our network and insights from interviews with our customers to understand the rise of this medium during the COVID-19 pandemic. We produced a series of articles, webinars,and infographics (both static and interactive) to showcase the findings,publishing them in concert with press releases that generated strong media coverage.

We alsomarriedthese two topics together, securing a session at the HIMSS21 conferencethat many of our prospects and customers attend, entitled"Behavioral Health Disparities: The Unsung Epidemic."This session examinedthe factors contributing to the rise in behavioral health diagnoses,shared what our customer EsperanzaHealth did to bridge community care gaps during COVID-19,and provided strategic recommendations to help address health equity.

In September 2021,we launched Connections by athenahealth,our new home to shareinsights for a healthier future.As partof this launch, we published a print magazine and redesigned website content highlighting original research and interviews with industry leaders.

Connections is the home of our thought leadership platform, integrated into our corporate website to allow for a connected experience throughout the marketing funnel.
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub

Virtual care: We used a variety of content formats to illuminate the findings of our research into telehealth usage at the start of the pandemic

With all our customers connectedon a single network and using the same instance of our software,ourathenaOneproduct gives usa unique ability to identifytrends in ambulatory medicine at anational scale.With a customer base of approximately140,000 providers made up of everything from small, independent practices to national health systemsto employer clinics,athenahealth captures trends ranging from chronic care management to acute care.

Compared with our competitorsin the healthcare IT space,our thought leadership content is more varied in tone and format, with a tone that aspires to educate, not sell, and creative content formats that go beyond articles and whitepapers,from quizzes to test your knowledge toe-books that bring together research insights with actionable, best-practice recommendations.Our data visualizations anddynamicinteractivesareunique.And when it comes to the focus of our content, we have our sights set on identifying where the industry is headed,and in turn, attracting audiences to our website to draw them into the sales pipeline.

Our thought leadershipalso attracts the attention of the media,from national publicationssuch asUSA TodayandPsychology Today,toacademic journalssuch asUSC Annenberg’sCenter for Health Journalism,and industry publicationsand associations like HFMA.

Finally,our media plans amplify our thought leadership to broader audiences. In 2021, we partnered with both Wired.com and The Wall Street Journal to cross-promote work publishedon our own website and produce original content featuring athenahealth leaders and customers.