athenaOne Erfahrungen

Vorteile

It is easy to use, fast and transactions are safe. As of today, I did not encounter any patient that complains when it comes to their billing statements with athenaone software. The statement enters through a link sent via SMS and email, in that way the patients will have choices in whatever mode they want to use to access their medical bill.

Nachteile

The only thing I would suggest for improvement is that once the patient settled the bill, they cannot review back immediately the previous bill posted but from the admin side, if there are any query from the patient, all the details can be accessed and viewed by the health care staff so it is still east to assist the patient.

Vorteile

AthenaOne has it all. It's an all-encompassing software, from checking in guests, to viewing EMRs, faxing documents, and communicating with patients; there is nothing else like it. The support team is quick to respond when there is an issue. It makes the work day so much more time-efficient and professional.

Nachteile

The updates can be a bit disruptive, but they work quickly to resolve any issues.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

EpicCare

Gründe für den Wechsel zu athenaOne

Athena was more appealing in the way the EHR is handled.

Vorteile

I like the ease of viewing my medical records past and present hassle free as well as being able to manage any scheduled appointments

Nachteile

I didnt like the the way it was all set up when i first used it i cant say anything about now present time considering i havent used it in a long while back then it was hard to find my way around for certian things but not to bad at all

Vorteile

The overall appearance of Athena is by far the best I have used so far.

Nachteile

Some of the areas are not very Userfriendly when it comes to credentialing status and Maintenace.

Vorteile

AthenaOne offers an intuitive interface and seamless integration of EHR and practice management tools. Its robust analytics empower informed decision-making, while the responsive customer support ensures any issues are promptly addressed, making it a reliable choice for healthcare providers.

Nachteile

While athenaOne offers robust features, its steep learning curve can be daunting for new users. Additionally, customer support response times may vary, leading to frustration when critical issues arise. Overall, navigation can feel cumbersome, affecting overall user experience.

Vorteile

There is really little that I can say about liking this software

Nachteile

Everything to do with billing claims and posting the monies. In addition, Athena calls and texts our patients excessively, to the point that a lot of them have opted out of notifications. I have had several patients recently who wanted Athena's number to complain about their service. That is another thing, you do not have the phone number of that one go-to person for assistance when you hit a wall.

Vorteile

The templates and text shortcuts were probably the best part of this software. The ability to add drop down menus and text boxes to your text shortcuts was extremely helpful for creating templates. The ability to share those shortcuts was also very useful for providing the same template to multiple people. Epocrates, which is the prescription side of Athena was also very nice for looking up drug interactions.

Nachteile

The layout of this software is terrible. Very confusing and it takes a lot of clicking to access any part of the patient’s chart. Not to mention switching between different sections of the chart requires the doctor who click and wait for the new page to load. This would have been much better if Athena used a more standard SOAP format all on one page.

Vorteile

Our practice had fewer errors when it came to billing

Nachteile

The cost was a bit pricey and some of our doctors did have a hard time learning

Vorteile

Easy to use and communicate with healthcare providers. Provides easy access to health records, test results, and messaging.

Nachteile

Email notification lag. When you receive a message from your doctor, they will send an email to notify you, but the email comes hours after you've received the message.

Vorteile

i can see my upcoming appts and send messages to my doctor

Nachteile

there seems to always be an issue when i try to log in. It also never lets me do any action in the system as it never works

Vorteile

I have seen this software grow over the years and now have friends using it within multiple different services lines in the healthcare industry. Some of the key pros I can think of quickly include:
- Flexibility, (features and design allow of different service locations, and different physicians within the same practice to see/edit EMR information to fit the individual)
- Transparency, (live EMR, Practice Management, Quality Management information is real time)
- ACCESS, simultaneous information access by multiple personnel in the same (or different) practice location
I personally use the product to manage primary care, imaging, laboratory, and physical therapy business lines simultaneously
- Communication with team members and patients by methods of preference (patients can select how they prefer to receive communications (phone, email, text or all)
- Customer service, both online and by phone access the clients get answers to questions quickly.
- Fantastic Online training syllabus. Staff and watch interactive videos to learn new (and more efficient) techniques to use the software in daily tasks. The training material is available 24/7 and moves at the pace the employee prefers.
- Remote access, key team members and physicians can access the information from anywhere at anytime greatly improving communications.

Nachteile

Advancement requests,or recommendations for improvements, from clients are rated and scored by clients across the system, which is a great design!

Recommendations from the User Community require time to develop, grade, prioritize and implement. Eventually, the highest costumer rated recommendations get attention and are implemented with accuracy; just takes time.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

EpicCare

Warum athenaOne gewählt wurde

I had Medinformatix and Praxis previously. The reasons I switch to Athena were many but primarily: -to improve the information/documentation workflow for the physicians; giving the physicians more control of the process and how they view the data. - gain access to better reporting and transparency on the financials, practice management side - modernize the communication with patients via a certified HIPAA portal -achieve complete compliance to government quality standards (e.g. Meaningful Use, MIPS, etc....) -active online / offsite backups - instance access to alternate (live) server should downtime ever be experienced (for me, only twice in over 8 years)

Gründe für den Wechsel zu athenaOne

The overall package just overwhelmed the competition at the time.

Vorteile

Claims scrubbing software. Our claims go out clean and are paid quickly. Support with MIPS. Reporting capability. Athena Text messaging. Versatility, software runs on any device. Athena text messaging. Monthly account manager calls and metrics. Partnership. Ease of creating order sets and working in clinicals. Market place partnerships are great and enhance the software and functions. Not afraid to be disruptive and things up looking for best and innovative practices.

Nachteile

Collector and Communicator insurance card copy do not communicate. Hoping one day soon you will be able to interface with EPIC. The reporting is so good that sometimes I need more support to ensure I am selecting the correct criteria.

Vorteile

Relatively easy to use after training and some oversite during implementation

Nachteile

It has little functionality for the large multi specialty group for customization. It doesn’t allow quick review of the ongoing story and treatment plan for chronic diseases. Medication flow charts are lacking for chronic disease management. The present ones are too cumbersome and time consuming to customize.

Vorteile

Lots of billing intelligence and assistance.

Nachteile

They focus heavily on the ambulatory side, and not as much on the hospital side.
Also- long wait times for customer support.

Vorteile

The organization of certain sections was done pretty well.

Easy INR managing.

Fairly good growth charts w/ automatically calculated percentages available.

Good implementation of external screening questionnaires, meaningful use, etc.

Ability to create auto-texts, templates, etc.

Nachteile

Glitchiest product imaginable: text formatting issues, superimposed text transferring to next screen, text failing to scroll to next line causing entire paragraph to look jumbled up, poor copy-paste, small view screens/boxes, stubborn dragging/sorting of ICD diagnosis code boxes, frequent slow-downs, freezes, sudden unpredictable crashes failing to save one’s note work.

Severely outdated terminology for certain medical diagnoses making simple common diseases difficult to find in search feature.

Abysmal medication refill system. 3, 5, sometimes even 10-15 min. to address 1 refill request (inexcusable). Very difficult to confidently say whether a prescription has actually been filled or not.

Medication lists are just a complete trainwreck. ‘Medicare monthly order form’ is not a medication that should EVER need to be reconciled.

System shockingly even was able to allow me to prescribe controlled substances under other doctors’ names unwittingly & w/o their consent.

Poorly interfaces w/ outside labs, pharmacies, hospitals, other clinics, etc. Does not communicate well w/ others.

Requires way too much daily hands-on maintenance work to keep organized, unsustainable for a busier practice.

Absolutely ZERO (& I do mean ZERO) helpful customer or IT support. Even had an Athena clinical trainor fly in to seemingly attempt to help, who only sat in the break room & fiddled on their computer the whole week & ultimately proved incapable of providing effective solutions.

Vorteile

We use AthenaHealth every day. The portal is easy to use and implement (users simply configure a browser, login). Their help desk is pretty decent. For a small to medium business looking for an Electronic Medical Portal for their staff to use, Athena would make a great alternative to larger options like Epic or Allscripts. It supports proprietary devices (payment processing, or card and check scanning devices) which can be a pain but makes purchasing and insurance scans and patient registration and charting easy overall. Updates seem to be fairly streamlined and well-communicated (happen quite often) and don't seem to impact care unless it's a larger update. Athena has a backup domain (if their site does down) as well as stack updates for troubleshooting down times with different components of the EHR which is VERY helpful.

Nachteile

Most changes are up-voted, which means that they are voted on by other agencies trying to get their changes implemented as most valuable. Things like Billing and Patient Care do not streamline well enough yet together--they work in two separate constructs, so our billing is constantly having to rework the way that they bill to fit the way Athena works with Patient Care. Troubleshooting with our medical assistants can sometimes be complex with Athena, so for more complex issues, the help desk might take you to two or three different folks to solve an issue. The Help Desk has become more complex making it harder to navigate ticketing. It was simpler to put in a ticket prior to the changes.

Vorteile

The Legacy system is the only part of this system I like and use consistently. It's all right, but they're getting rid of it instead of improving the issues we've asked to have fixed.

Nachteile

Where to start?

The community aspect used to communicate with other users is only helpful when Athena feels that your voice matters, and unless you're kissing their feet, they couldn't care less about your comments/concerns. They'll merge or delete complaints about their new UI and refuse to ask their users for opinions before implementing a system that doesn't work.

Then there's the fact that their new system isn't even user friendly! They would rather block you from commenting and voicing concerns than accept criticism on a broken system on the community page. On top of that, they'll send you the same script that DOES NOT answer your questions/comments/concerns instead of address the problem, then tell you to send complaints to their developing team, who in turn send you ANOTHER script.

And don't even get me started on how many concerns/complaints have gone unsolved in the name of "modernity," or how their 'help' section answers almost no questions posed but will send you links to useless videos and threads that didn't answer the questions there, either. Utterly embarrassing.

Needless to say, you'd be better off spending money on a company that actually asks its users on their opinion before implementing a broken UI and answers you.

Vorteile

The billing component is extremely beneficial though, I have found that some of my offices have thought that is does ALL billing. (Again, I think it's a lack of understanding and initial training.)

The access to helpline is great. Having a live person to talk to has been helpful. (It's sometimes can take longer periods of time to come to a solution but they normally stay patient until there is a solution. I've been on the phone with help desk for up to 3 hours before.)

Educational videos are always available for staff to turn back to. Live in-office trainings would help AthenaNet to be more successful. (I had a cardiologist go-live with AthenaNet then 3 weeks later returned back to his original EMR. I believe it was because of the lack in training. Physicians don't typically take time to watch training videos.)

The EMR continues to evolve based changes in health care.

AthenaNet assigning scanned paper work to patient charts.

Nachteile

Common complaints we hear from physicians, staff and admin - there is a lot of scrolling within a patient chart. Yes, you can jump using links but it takes a lot of retraining old habits. Quality Reports can't be adjusted - such as running reports for quality measures for different time periods for in-office comparison. Dates within reports don't show up in the header when printed. Defaults are practice wide and can't be adjusted.

Vorteile

Customer support is really responsive and easy to get ahold of. Unfortunately, the level of expertise of the customer support staff is variable, so often, they do not know the answers to the questions we have. Billing is a pretty common area of issue here.

Nachteile

I was assured that this program had a lot of podiatry based templates and that they were simple to modify. However, there are very few templates for my specialty, and trying to make or change a template is frustrating! It takes an hour at least to do one template. And, you cannot use the same template choice more than once in a template, so if you are trying to chart two feet, good luck!
The EMR takes forever to implement (11 weeks). I think that our implementation manager did not do a very good job of setting us up, so we have been having to try to learn everything on our own, which is frustrating and time-consuming when we are busy trying to see patients.
There is a lot of typing that has to be done during patient visits, which takes a lot of time and slows my pace and ability to see as many patients as I would like. Trying to just put in CPT codes takes forever. Also, save your work every minute because there is no auto-save on this program and I have lost so much information!
Do not believe it if you are told that Athena does your insurance credentialing for you. We have had to do it all ourselves. And you cannot pick and choose what claims are dropped for payment; it is all or nothing, so have a lot of working capital available while you credential.
EFT (electronic funds transfers) have to be done through US Bank. We use Wells Fargo, so I have to do money transfers, which take a couple business days to process, and that is a real pain. We have also found out the hard way that unless we track each individual claim ourselves, secondary insurances may fall through the cracks, leaving money on the table that we have to find and process ourselves. I fear that our income is not going to improve (contrary to their claim that they improve collections by 8%) and, in fact, that we will potentially lose money.
Our paper usage has increased substantially. You cannot just scan documents into the program. You have to fax them to Athena, and they sort them and place them into the patient's chart. However, you have to have a front cover and back cover bar code for each fax you send them so that a one-page fax becomes three pages.
E-prescribing is hit or miss, so I have to double check that all e-scripts actually have gone through. Also, we get numerous complaints about how complicated the patient portal is.

Vorteile

I like that AthenaOne provides an integrated suite of tools and services to help providers manage their practice and ensure quality care. The medical record is comprehensive and easy to use, and payment capabilities are streamlined. It also includes integration with a clinical network that provides access to additional resources. In addition, the patient engagement feature helps build relationships and facilitate better care.

Nachteile

The least favorite part of AthenaOne is that it can be a bit expensive to purchase and implement. It may also require additional training to get the most out of its features. However, the cost and time invested in AthenaOne is worth it when considering the long-term benefits it provides.

Vorteile

The implementation was easy to set-up. Athena was a big help in creating forms and letters. The tempplates are easy to set-up and modify as well. Once the forms have been created you can also make changes to them as well. The order of the check-in through check-out process is set-up in a way that is easy to navigate and goes in order of how you treat your patient. The best part is that Athena takes care of the MIPS, MACRA, etc data that is needed for Medicare without adding additional work for the staff. I like the fact that there are less documents that require scanning, since all of our faxes go directly into the system and are attached directly to the patient's record. The reporting options are also very good with this system.

Nachteile

I really don't dislike anything about the software, other than it would be nice to track letters that are sent to the patients. So you can print off collection letters or follow-up letters and it would automatically record that a letter went to the patient, without you having to make a notation.

Vorteile

- SO easy to use
- Has excellent and easily accessible customer support
- Has a system to "vote" for new ideas and improvements from users
- Maximizes workflow and efficiency
- Allows for fair amount of customization for organizational needs

Nachteile

While Athena as an organization has a platform to vote on and suggest ideas, they seem less interested in improving the product that they have and more interested in moving forward as the EHR of the future. While I appreciate their aspirations, as a user, I think it would behove them to take a pause and a deep listen to what the users are asking for to improve upon what they already have. The product they have is great, but there are small glitches and ways in which it could be even more smooth and seamless and maximize profit for the users. A great example is that they don't have a well developed way of interlinking CPT2 codes to the necessary places. All this has to be done manually by the users and it is a very clunky and time consuming process. CPT2 codes are the way of the future where insurance companies will be utilizing them to quantify quality. If Athena continues to ignore this gaping lack of service, they will lose clients to other programs (i.e. Epic) which have integrated this process more fully. Athena could benefit from not just listening but acting on what FQHCs have been telling them for years as ultimately this will put them ahead of the game and prepare them for the future of medicine.

Vorteile

Ease of completing progress notes. Really really easy referrals. Accessibility of lab and imaging results. Consult notes not lost. Nothing lost. Confirmations by the system. Eligibility checked repeatedly. They have an interface with all the labs already so you don't have to pay to reinvent the wheel.

Nachteile

I hate the letter format and cannot get it fixed. The financial piece promised much more than it actually does.

Vorteile

Ability to obtain raw data to measure outcomes

Nachteile

Standards to ensure that table building spaces can easily be audited and evaluate outcomes on table spaces
Reports and communicator have limited capabilities
Uds data reporting and non use of super users to provide support

Vorteile

I like the fact you can Athena fax records but you can only fax 10 pages at a time through it. More than that it said it was to large to Athena fax. I like that it uses a scanner for ID cards and ins cards. Just keeps a pic of it, does not upload info from the cards while scanning

Nachteile

Most everything! Still need a biller! I don't know what really I am paying for with this large % they are taking from me.. We work most claims our self. When they say you have a manager to help, they just refer you to the csc.. Which is the 1800 hotline help. Most times they don't know the answer and 1 question takes 15 min to solve. They always say "let me put u on a 5 min hold while I find an answer"
When I need to schedule it is not user friendly. I have to delete an apt to reschedule. Not a good flow.
Now about refunding overpayments. The office has to do it! Again! This is the help Athena states.... When a claim develops a credit balance, the OVERPYMT kick code is applied and the claim moves to OVERPAID status. Then I need to review the claim and investigate whether a payer intends to recover the funds and then determine the appropriate response.
Refund
Takeback
Unclaimed payment

Clients are responsible for working claims with insurance credit balances (overpayments). This includes contacting the payer, reviewing EOBs, and initiating takebacks or refunds.

There is no support at all!!! Everyone points the finger. Manager says call csc.. And csc cannot get answers.

We did not get paid for 3 months when we started back in December 2015. And once I can actually get money and fill my savings again for my business I will be finding a new Emr! The worst financial decision I ever had was going w Athena and believing they are good with billing.
Once you start with Athena you feel trapped because you have to stick it out or you could go bankrupt. I will be glad to talk to anyone wanting to go with Athena and tell you about all my documented problems.