Everything You Need to Know about athenahealth EMR in 2021

Athenahealth offers a fully-featured suite of Health IT solutions for healthcare practices to automate workflows and improve patient care quality. It is a leading provider of cloud-based services for EHR, practice management, and care coordination. As per Athena EMR Reviews, this intuitive solution supports a number of medical facilities with scheduling, charting, billing, revenue cycle management, and more. You can easily choose between robust deployment options and get improved flexibility with mobile support. 

On top of this, Athenahealth EMR Reviews also suggest that it lets clinics and medical facilities of all sizes to focus on treatment and patient care without compromising productivity or clinical efficiency. It also facilitates communication between patients and their providers so to enable patients to actively participate in their care process. It uses functionalities and services that meet the demands of HIPAA and let the provider achieve compliance with ease. 

This platform helps providers efficiently manage the process of care for maximum clinical efficiency, deliver quality services, and perform tasks to ensure full payment. You can keep track of all the guidelines provided by a healthcare professional to take care of the results and follow-up care. According to Athena EHR Reviews, the vendor comes with top-of-the-line features, such as custom benchmarking, daily responsibility monitoring, and proactive trend analysis, to automate practice management.

This article explores the key features, benefits, limitations, and pricing details of the product to help you make a wise purchase for your practice.

Athena EMR Modules

It offers five powerful modules to help clinicians manage various aspects of their practice.

• AthenaClinicals: It is the software’s electronic health records (EHR) platform that facilitates clinical charting. 

• AthenaCommunicator: It provides a platform for healthcare professionals to connect with patients and their fellow doctors. 

• AthenaCollector: It addresses the practice management requirements of users and streamlines day-to-day clinical tasks.  

• AthenaClarity: It offers a data analytics module that assists clinicians in performing operational and financial management tasks. 

• AthenaCoordinator: It allows medical practitioners to share information and perform order transmissions efficiently.

Core Features

• Patient Portal

Athena's patient portal is designed to let patients access their medical records, pay bills, track their health history, schedule appointments, and more using their mobile devices.  As per Athena EHR Reviews, physicians can also communicate with their patients through video calls, messaging, or notes. This portal even allows them to send reminders via text messages, email, or mobile.

• Connected Health Network

It allows physicians to provide improved quality of care with connected knowledge from over 160,000 providers and 100 million patients. You can easily exchange information with a quarter of a million points of care, such as urgent cares, providers, labs, pharmacies, and more. It also lets you compare your practice's population health performance with that of other providers.

• Clinical Summaries

Your medical facility can provide clinical summaries on paper or through the patient portal. It also generates encounter summaries upon completion of the patient encounter, which you can print or provide to the patient or post to the portal. Moreover, you can send in-office tasks' to a care team member, letting them participate in the process of following up on patient care planning and education.

• Epocrates

Its Epocrates tool help users identify potentially harmful interactions from up to 30 over-the-counter drugs and prescriptions simultaneously. You can also gather guidance separated by patient type and access peer-reviewed diagnostics.

• Authorization Management

This platform provides integrated authorization management services to its EHR and practice management clients. It efficiently supports prior electronic authorization on clinical documentation using HSR-278 EDI standards. You can also keep track of changing payers' rules with end-to-end visibility via an integrated dashboard.

• Record Demographics

You can maintain records of patient demographic information, such as insurance type, preferred language, ethnicity, gender, race, etc. It can work as inclusion/exclusion criteria or as filters in reports, enabling practice staff to target specific patient populations for outreach.

• Scheduling

Providers can optimize the number of patients that they can see each day with appointment scheduling tools. Athenahealth EMR Reviews suggest that you can significantly reduce no-shows while improving patient satisfaction with online patient check-in and automated reminders.

Overview of Benefits

• Interoperability

It enables providers to exchange important patient data with other healthcare sites while also adding critical information to a patient's chart in real-time.

• Patient Engagement

It lets patients exchange messages with their doctors, request prescription refills, view lab results, and more through their mobile devices. Patients can also receive notifications and automated reminders about their appointments, billing, and follow-up care.

• Return on Investment

Your healthcare organization can grow financially in the long run. You can qualify for monetary government incentives simply by implementing an EHR for qualifying facilities and also win more incentives for meeting meaningful use standards.

• Healthcare Regulations

This keeps track of changes to federal quality programs, so practice owners don't have to. You can stay one step ahead of changing healthcare regulations like MACRA and MIPS.

Limitations

• This system does not come with an integrated telehealth solution.
• It does not support handwriting recognition.

Athena EMR Pricing

The pricing for Athenahealth EHR license starts at $140 per provider/month.

Final Thoughts

After analyzing Athena EMR Reviews from multiple online resources, we conclude that this product provides comprehensive functionalities that streamline daily practice tasks and improve overall efficiency. Users also report that its interface is easy to navigate. But your decision to invest in this system depends entirely on your practice requirements and budget. Our suggestion: explore Athenahealth if you are a small practice and searching for a good EHR software.