What happens when healthcare spends decades and hundreds of billions of dollars digitizing medical records — but clinicians still can't see the whole patient?

On this episode of Straight Outta Health IT, Christopher Kunney sits down with healthcare technology veteran Jonathan Bush, Founder & CEO of Zus Health and co-founder of athenahealth, for an unfiltered conversation about the problem hiding in plain sight: healthcare has plenty of data but too much of it is trapped in silos. Jonathan doesn't mince words. He calls out “data defensiveness” the instinct across health systems, vendors and physician organizations to treat healthcare data as something to control rather than something to share for the benefit of the patient.

And then there's the bigger problem: The EHR was built to store data. It wasn't built to orchestrate care. So what happens when we stop treating the medical record like a filing cabinet and start treating it like a living, shared picture of the patient?

Christopher and Jonathan go deep on: 

• Why today's EHR infrastructure wasn't designed for value-based care
• Data defensiveness and why it can work against better outcomes
• The shift from fee-for-service to value-based care
• Federated medical records and the idea of a common patient record
• Why healthcare organizations can be reluctant to share data
• Why the “fourth D” may be data
• How AI can turn buried clinical information into actionable intelligence
• Why AI may finally unlock the value sitting inside the medical record
• What happens when AI agents become part of always-on care
• The future of always-on, coordinated healthcare
• Why the patient — not the claim, encounter or health system — needs to become the center of the record