After going quiet in recent years, former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush has returned to the industry with a new healthcare startup. Called Zus, the idea is to give new digital health startups the building blocks to manage medical records. Zus aims to create a shared data platform that doctors, regardless of specialty or location, can access to better understand their patients.
- Past tale: Bush was ousted from Athenahealth three years ago, while the company faced a takeover bid by activist investor Elliott Management. During that time, old court records came to light showing domestic violence allegations from his ex-wife. He apologized, saying he would “take responsibility for all these regrettable incidents.”
- Innovation soars high: “The software needed by a neurologist, a surgeon, and a digital health app are all very different. Yet today we try to jam them all onto one thing,” Bush said in a news release. “We think healthcare is ripe for a platform company that lets everyone write their own front ends while sharing appropriate data in the back.”
- Front-end experience: This startup would give digital health companies a set of tools to bring together medical records and claims using FHIR resources, and build their own front-end experiences. It also would give patients the ability to understand how their data is used. The company is starting with $34 million in series A funding led by Andreesen Horowitz. Julie Yoo, a general partner with the firm, will also join Zus’ board.
- Capacity: With Zus, he’s trying to create capacity. The company has a lot of plans, which includes a growing library of software tools around patient relationship management, a data aggregation service that helps standardize medical records for sharing purposes, a platform that sits atop this information so that multiple doctors can access the same information and a patient portal that lets users understand how their data is shared and accessed.
- Better health outcomes: Julie Yoo, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz said that Zus embodies its digital health stack thesis, which argues the need for “infrastructure platforms that serve the large and rapidly growing population of digital health companies, such that each company no longer has to build the same underlying tech and operations components over and over again, from scratch.”