The headline from athena in 2026: more ecosystem opportunity than ever, and more competition than ever.
This blog is based on Bob Segert's recent interview on the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. I've added my commentary and analysis.
athena is still growing. Care keeps moving out of hospitals and into ASCs, and when outpatient doctors and billing teams get to pick, they pick athena. Those are two quiet but powerful signals about where the platform is headed.
The implication for marketplace partners is uncomfortable but clear: if what you do isn't hard to build, athena will build a free version of it. Ambient AI is the 2026 proof point. It won't be the last. The partners who will thrive are the ones who pick the one thing they do better than anyone else and become the absolute best at it. Know your problem and your customer cold. Differentiate from the vibe-coded +5 solutions. Have a tight ROI story. This is not your GameStop moment.
Ecosystem
athena is fully committed to the open ecosystem. That's good news for marketplace partners. Bob frames the bigger competitive picture as ecosystems competing with ecosystems. For marketplace partners, the more pressing view is inside athena's ecosystem, where athena isn't sitting out the competition.
athena's longtime strategy is "if they might beat you, let them join you." Rather than letting point solutions grow into EHR, RCM, or patient engagement replacements, athena lets them flourish on its rails and makes the ecosystem more robust.
athena is serious about competing in the ecosystem:
$350M+ on R&D this year, half of it on net new capabilities
2,000-person engineering team
800+ read/write APIs, 500+ marketplace partners, 170k providers, 120 specialties supported
athena is faster at building competing features and fueling marketplace innovation at the same time.
AI
Free embedded ambient AI is the biggest story of the year. athena announced it last October and it's in testing now. Ambient AI vendors didn't see it coming. athena had been positioning as if they'd let ambient vendors hold that territory.
Quick map of how ambient shows up in the athena ecosystem. Some vendors integrate deeply, either directly (ex: Suki has a browser solution and writes back to athena via APIs) or through athena's own Ambient Notes app, where practices pick a vendor like Suki or iScribe from a settings dropdown. Other voice vendors on the marketplace took the cheap path: drop everything into one field and call it done. athena's free ambient AI is now an option in the Ambient Notes dropdown alongside the paid vendors.
I watched a wave of marketplace partners roll out ambient AI features (with various levels of integration) over the last year, even when ambient was nowhere near their core problem. It got easy. So athena built one too.
Well-researched, well-built solutions will still outperform the free version. Some of the clinics that wouldn't pay for ambient before will try athena's, and then upgrade to a Suki or an Ambience once they see what better looks like. The free version becomes the first rung on the ladder. Bob expects different specialties: ortho, cardio, family practice, to pick different tools.
Bob shared what's on athena's AI roadmap:
Ambient scribe
AI that answers the phone and portal messages
Clinical decision support
AI-enabled coding
Prior auth
If you're a marketplace partner in any of these spaces, the question isn't whether athena builds a version. It's whether what you do is hard enough that the free version doesn't catch you.
MSOs
MSOs are some of the best buyers in the marketplace. They're built around optimization, and they typically have someone on staff whose job is to evaluate technology that can help their practices. Marketplace partners are more successful when they have an engaged person to sell to.
Why MSOs love athena: the same reasons independent physician groups do, plus the ability to quickly add new practices and roll out new technology. Adding a new clinic to an athena instance is faster than a fresh install, with less configuration and the API connections already in place. Privia is the perennial example. They've tricked out athena with great marketplace partners and some home-grown tech, building their secret sauce on athena's APIs.
athena has also opened channels for existing customers to join MSOs, which is especially attractive to practices looking for success in value-based care contracts. Expect new MSOs to keep popping up as independent practices look for a competitive edge against health systems and vertically integrated payviders.
Interoperability
athena rebundled their interoperability features and services under athenaConnect and launched it at HIMSS 2026. For partners, this meant a new marketplace that makes it easier to promote your solution (and forced everyone to re-optimize their listings), an updated dev portal with LLM-powered search for the right API documentation, and a new tiering system (Alliance and Preferred) that rewards partners who perform.
athena implemented TEFCA at scale faster than any other major EHR. Their cloud-native architecture and open ecosystem make data sharing less painful than on other major platforms. There's still a role for partners like Metriport and Zus even as athena's chart sync expands, especially for the telehealth point solutions pushing healthcare to improve at the edges.
MCP
athena's MCP (Model Context Protocol) server is coming soon, and it's the development I'm watching most closely. For those who don't know MCP: it's a way to expose every action you can take in a database to an LLM or agent. "Fetch Dr. Jones's appointments, cancel his 2pm, and add a new one at 1pm" becomes a single prompt instead of three API calls you had to build and wire together.
For partners, this changes the math on integrations in two ways. You won't need to build individual API connections for every action you want to take; the LLM will pick the right one for you. And for the activities you do over and over, you can use MCP to scaffold real API connections once, then execute against those instead of spending LLM tokens every time.
The gap between the people with the problem and the people with the tools to solve it is about to shrink considerably.
The athena pitch
I have many conversations with partners about their positioning and their pitch. It is helpful to know what athena’s pitch is to practices, because every practice a marketplace partner is selling to, has already bought what athena is selling.
Bob shared a 5-10% rev cycle improvement. However, money isn’t the whole story. Some doctors prefer spending less documenting encounters and more time with their families, rather than squeezing in an extra few appointments. For RCM leaders, they don’t have to manually run as many reports and get back more time in their lives too. Less burn out. More delight. More time with patients. Making the job less hard.
I'm optimistic for athena's future. They're rising up to meet the moment of AI and they're doing it as an ecosystem. That's good for practices and patients. The out-of-the-box product gets better and so does the marketplace.
For marketplace partners, the implication is sharper. Anyone with a basket of simple solutions athena hasn't built is on notice. The partners who win from here will do PhD-level research on the problem they've taken on. Their whole team will be aligned on the thesis. The ones who don't will watch their customers move to higher-caliber solutions.