Dr. Atul Gawande Receives Inaugural athenahealth Vision Award

First annual award recognizes individuals, organizations that are “making health care work as it should”

WATERTOWN, Mass. (May 06, 2011) – athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health record (EHR), and patient communication services to medical groups, named Dr. Atul Gawande recipient of its first annual athenahealth Vision Award. The Award was established in recognition of individuals and organizations that embody and extend the company’s vision of “making health care work as it should.” Dr. Gawande was presented with the inaugural award on April 26th at the Company’s National User Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr. Gawande is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the award-winning author of several bestselling books on the practice of medicine in the U.S., including Better, Complications, and most recently, Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right. He is on the surgical staff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and serves as an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Jonathan Bush, athenahealth CEO and Chairman, said “From his position as a practicing surgeon, academic, and author, Dr. Gawande has significantly moved the needle of awareness in regard to the process and information gaps that exist in the country’s health care system. He has highlighted flaws stemming from a lack of centralized patient information and problems relating to pay per service and end of life care that have caused policy makers, health systems, providers of care, and even consumers of health care to, at the least, scratch their head, and, more often, to concede that the status quo for delivering care is failing us. Dr. Gawande continues to inspire and inform a national dialogue towards solving these problems.”

About athenahealth

athenahealth, Inc. is a leading provider of cloud-based business services for physician practices. athenahealth’s service offerings are based on proprietary web-native practice management and electronic health record (EHR) software, a continuously updated payer knowledge-base, integrated back-office service operations, and automated and live patient communication services. For more information, please visit www.athenahealth.com or call (888) 652-8200.

Source: athenahealth