The athena Marketplace Has Over 500 Partners. Here's How Practices Are Actually Choosing.
A founder told me last week that he's losing athena deals to vendors that aren't even on the athenahealth marketplace.
That's a meaningful shift. The marketplace is supposed to be the curation layer. The place where practices can trust they're looking at vetted, integrated, athena-aware vendors. But practices have started reaching outside it, bringing vendors into evaluations through conferences, peer recommendations, LinkedIn DMs, and ChatGPT search results.
athena saw this coming. The new tiering system is a direct response to it allowing athena to signal to practice which partners it feels comfortable recommending. It's the right move, and over time it should reshape how practices navigate the marketplace. But the pool of tiered partners is small, it must grow to solve the underlying problem: there are over 500 partners on the marketplace and practices only have so much energy to put into a decision.
I've been hearing a version of this story from almost every practice operator I talk to. So I want to put down what's actually happening on the buyer side, why it's happening, and what marketplace partners can do about it right now.
A few macro factors are converging at once
Healthcare is broken, and more people than ever want to fix it. They've felt the pain firsthand, often as patients or family members, sometimes from inside the industry. They have personal conviction. That's good. It also means a lot of new entrants.
It's never been easier to build software. The barrier to launching a healthcare product is the lowest it's ever been.
Admin work dominates daily activity at the clinic, and practice owners see AI everywhere in their personal lives. They want to adopt something. But they don't have time to separate good from junk.
The result: a flood of vendors with similar-sounding claims, and buyers who want to buy, but have no reliable way to filter them.
What stops working
The marketing tactics that worked five years ago don't anymore when every vendor sounds the same. "We help practices save time and improve patient experience" is a sentence that could come from any of the 500 vendors on the marketplace. It tells the buyer nothing. It gets ignored.
Claims of improvement that only have percentages go next. '30% efficiency gain' was always a thin claim, but it used to be enough to get someone on the phone. Now most vendors have a stat in that range, and buyers discount them.
Marketplace presence used to signal credibility. It's still helpful, but it's no longer sufficient. Being on the marketplace tells a buyer you cleared a baseline. It doesn't tell them you're the right choice among the 60 other vendors in your category.
What’s actually getting people’s attention
When the marketplace can't filter for them, practices fall back on the oldest filter there is: who do I know that uses this, and what did they say about it.
Specific testimonials from peer practices are doing the work that generic marketing used to do. Not metrics. Stories from people the buyer recognizes as similar to themselves. A 200-doc orthopedic group on athena wants to hear from another 200-doc orthopedic group on athena. Specialty-specific references matter more than total customer count. A vendor with 200 customers but none in ortho is effectively zero-reference for an ortho group.
This is the practical implication for marketplace partners: audit your testimonials by specialty and by practice size. If a buyer in your highest-priority specialty can't find a peer reference on your page, that's the gap to close before anything else. More features won't fix it. A bigger marketing budget won't fix it. A peer voice will.
The marketplace is going to get better. Tiering will mature, and athena will keep refining how practices discover partners. But the companies winning between now and then are the ones who understand that the buyer's reality has changed, and who are showing up with the kind of proof buyers are actually looking for.