It’s always fun to chat with Jonathan Bush. You kids today may not remember that he was the first CEO to take a cloud-based (Health 2.0!) company public back in 2007! Athenahealth didn’t end up challenging Epic because a cosmically evil hedge fund took it (and him) down as it was on its way to try to do that, but Jonathan has moved on and is now building a clinical data integration company called Zus Health. We talked Zus, digital health, whether there will ever be value-based care and more. 20 mins of digital health gold right here–Matthew Holt
Jonathan Bush Launches Zus with $35M & “Build-Your-Own EMR” Proposition for Health Tech Startups
By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Jonathan Bush has “More Disruption Please-d” himself and is back at it with a new company, Zus (get it…like the father of Athena) backed by a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, F-Prime Capital, Maverick Ventures, & Rock Health.
“It’s ‘Build-A-Bear’ for EMR, patient relationship management, CRMs…” says Jonathan, and meant to help digital health startups work around incumbent EMR companies by providing a developer kit of components common to the “middle” of a health tech stack — AND a single shared record backend where all Zus clients can land and access patient data.
The intention is to help digital health startups reduce the time and cost of developing their tech by eliminating the redundant, generic aspects of building a healthcare tech stack in the same way companies like Stripe or Twilio have taken the burden out of writing code to process payments or integrate messaging. Zus intends to be the go-to for code used to make an appointment, create a patient profile, connect to a telehealth platform, etc. And the shared record on the back end? Does that make Zus a next-gen EMR company?? Find out more about Zus’s business model, current client list, and why, exactly, Jonathan believes that NOW is the time that the dream of the shared patient medical record is within reach.
