athenaHealth athenaClinicals EMR Software Review

The athenaClinicals is a low-investment, high return electronic health record (EHR) solution. It has grown rapidly to become possibly the leading Cloud-based, ambulatory care service provider. Athenahealth helps medical practices, large and small, get more money and more control thus, boost productivity. Physicians using athenaClinicals see an average of 3.4% (based on a six month survey) increase in patient visits compared with a reported 10-15% decrease across the industry recently.

This EMR sosftware solution is very low maintenance, customizable, and offers many services that you will not get with most vendors on the market. Seeing that it has over 23,000 users nationwide, it is probably a safe bet that athenaClinicals is a solid solution. This is due to the fact that there would be far less practitioners using the solution in their practices every single day if this were not true.

It positions itself as a true practice partner for your practice. You can in fact, have regular Practice Performance reviews with your account manager to discuss ways that can help you become more efficient with the use of your athenahealth EMR. This is because athenahealth tries to make using the EMR as easy as possible. Moreover, it has received ONC-ATBC 2011/2012 Certification which is another guarantee that the eligible practitioners who use it will receive meaningful use stimulus payments.

The athenahealth solution offers more than just software; it delivers back-office services by providing a large team of revenue cycle management and clinical specialists. They assist health care providers in managing paperwork and collections processes.  The team will receive and route faxed information to the appropriate person in the office in addition to attaching it to the patient's chart. They also help in the management of reporting and tracking requirements for various government incentive programs. Consequently, physicians get more time to spend with patients and thereby providing great health care.

One of the benefits of using athenahealth is that you do not need to buy or maintain servers nor manage upgrades. athenaClinicals’ Cloud-based architecture is such that it hosts all software and data in their secure data centres. The users of this system have access via web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari) over the Internet. At the same time, the centralized nature of the Cloud model makes it easy for athenahealth to maintain one centralized rules database for clinical guidelines, payer requirements, and government incentive programs. Likewise, interoperability functions are developed and managed centrally by athenahealth for the connectivity to laboratories, pharmacies, hospitals and health information exchanges. 

AthenaClinicals is different from other EMR’s not only because it is cloud-based but also through its use of the rules database. The rules database is a “Quality Management Engine" that allows to you have access to "industry-trusted data” as soon as a change occurs. This is due to the fact that the solution is web-based and updates are real-time. It includes P4P and PQRI criteria, formulary requirements, clinical guidelines and protocols, Meaningful Use HITECH act requirements and the athenaCollector billing codes which are captured through charge integration.