athenaOne

Very easy to pick up and get going.

Athena review

For the most part excellent. Upgrades and updates seem to have slowed down and I think Athena has leaned more on the Market Place Vendors and less on enhancing included offers. I have made suggestions over the years and have given up as I do not feel the suggestions postings are something that Athena has been able to keep up with.

Able to be modified

Great reports, poor customer service

Athena has a great and robust reporting module especially helpful for practices attesting for meaningful use and PCMH, the problem with this is that it is difficult to do on your own and requires a Customer service ticket which takes a long time to get answered.

The charting is easy once you get your templates setup. If you do not do this on the front end (during implementation) getting help to do later is impossible and you will need help as it is not very intuitive. Many templates were lost during one of their upgrades without warning so it has been difficult to rebuild them. We have grown and added locations while on Athena and because they are your primary biller if they do not verify all of the credentialing that you send them you cannot bill. This was problematic because you cannot directly talk to the persons doing this there is always a go-between with Athena.

I love the EPCS for patients requiring a schedule, as a pediatrician I have quite a few ADHD pts and nice not to worry about assessing where prescriptions really lost! No need for paper. However, with one of their upgrades, I can no longer save medications so must write sig and quantity for every medication each time which is time-consuming.

Lastly, the promised billing has failed our practice. The workflow was to be we would not need a biller and get increased revenue with clean claims. We see a large Medicaid population and were not told that they had virtually no experience with that and even going to them with specifics as to the problem it would still take upwards a month to fix. Not only have we not gotten rid of our biller but increased his time as many Medicaid claims he submits thru the portal yet Athena charges us for this. The account managers are unavailable in meetings vacations or no longer with the company.
Pros: Reporting, Easy charting once template is created, EPCS, Integration of charges to the superbill
Cons: Customer support, E-prescribing, Not reasonable expectation to not need a biller, Overpriced, not a good fit if you are a practice that adds services, providers, or locations, must use their bank to receive payments and then it takes 1-2 days to get transferred to your business account

Athena EMR

Overall, very good EMR. Great price. Poor support and improvements on hospital platform