Name Jonathan Bush Aunts Nancy Walker Bush Ellis Siblings Billy Bush | Parents Jonathan Bush Role Executive | |
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Born March 10, 1969 (age 55) ( 1969-03-10 ) Occupation President and CEO of athenahealth Relatives George W. Bush (cousin)
George H. W. Bush (uncle)
Billy Bush (brother) Uncles George H. W. Bush, William H. T. Bush, Prescott Bush, Jr. Books Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care Similar People Jonathan Bush, Billy Bush, Todd Park, Stephen L Baker, George H W Bush | ||
Jonathan S. Bush (born March 10, 1969) is an American technology entrepeneur, best known as the cofounder and chief executive officer of athenahealth, a Watertown, Massachusetts-based healthcare technology company founded in 1997.
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Early life and education
Bush is the son of Jonathan Bush, cousin of U.S. President George W. Bush, nephew of U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and brother of television presenter Billy Bush. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the Allen-Stevenson School.
Bush graduated from the Phillips Academy college preparatory school in Andover, Massachusetts. He attended Boston University for one year in 1988-89, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies, and earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard University in 1997.
Early career
While at Wesleyan, Bush took off two years from his studies to work on George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. As an EMT, Bush spent his college summer vacations operating a 911-response ambulance in New Orleans. In 1991, Bush trained as a combat medic during Operation Desert Storm, doing boot camp at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, but did not ship out because the war ended before he finished.
The business side of Bush’s training stemmed from his time as an associate of J. Bush & Company, Inc., a firm founded by his father that assisted foreign embassies in banking, and as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was a member of its Managed Care Strategy Group.
athenahealth
In 1997, Bush and Todd Park, a colleague from Booz Allen, founded Athena Women’s Health, a women’s health and birthing clinic housed in San Diego for soon-to-be, new, and current mothers. After Park’s brother Ed Park helped develop its system, Athena Women’s Health transformed into athenahealth, a healthcare technology platform offering a suite of services to help hospital and ambulatory providers coordinate care and work at the tops of their licenses. In 2000, Bush raised more than $10 million in venture capital funding to support athenahealth, which launched a successful IPO in 2007. Bush is now athenahealth’s CEO.
Publications
Bush is the author, with Stephen L. Baker, of the New York Times bestseller Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care (Penguin, May 2014). He is also a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and STAT, and to podcasts like POLITICO Pulse Check.
Honors and awards
In 2013, Bush was named CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC). In 2016 he received the Tufts Medical Center’s Ellen M. Zane Award for Visionary Leadership. Fortune included Bush as a “disruptor” in its list of “34 Leaders Who Are Changing Healthcare,” writing that “few are more persuasive—and outspoken—about the need to repair our healthcare system.”