AthenaHealth Practice Management Software Review
AthenaHealth practice management software, AthenaOne, consists of an EHR system, billing functions and healthcare practice management features. With its cloud-based suite of services, the AthenaHealth PMS software promises to improve clinical efficiency, increase practice performance and enable you to offer better patient experiences. As one of our top picks for medical practitioners, this PMS offers some outstanding front desk and patient management features that make it easy and efficient to run your practice. What sets this PMS apart is its ability to streamline workflows, reduce documentation, process claims faster, and patient engagement tools that support clinicians in providing better healthcare.
The AthenaHealth system provides quality reporting features with limitless filters, making it easier to work with than most other PMS. Its functionalities can reshape your practice, allowing you to leverage modern scheduling, telehealth, e-prescribing, and front-office billing tools. The athenaOne software can help you compare your KPIs with other similar practices in its massive network so you can make informed improvements.
This review details the features to expect if you want to use AthenaHealth as your practice management software.
Key Features of AthenaHealth Practice Management Software
AthenaCollector (Billing & Practice Management)
As one of the most essential features that medical practitioners lookout for, the practice management and billing solutions on the AthenaHealth platform allow medical practices to manage their front-desk tasks more efficiently, from patient appointment scheduling and reminder tools to billing functionalities that make it easy to process payments and claims, this PMS shows good potential to handle time-consuming administrative tasks.
This feature will enable your front desk staff to see daily, weekly, and monthly appointment bookings and process patients’ information much faster. It helps prevent the issues that could damage patient experience by automating time-consuming administrative and billing activities that could be detrimental to patient satisfaction.
Rather than call the front desk, patients can schedule visits online while reminders help reduce no-shows by informing them of their appointment schedule. Recurring reminders can be set via phone calls, email or text messaging, letting you know that the patient will show up to avoid wasting appointment slots.
Processing billings and managing claims with the AthenaOne system is relatively seamless. Although you will still need a biller on staff, this tool helps you determine patient eligibility and prevents errors that can cause rejections and denials.
It also continuously reviews payers to ensure their payments are coming in properly. The system gives you a complete view of your financial performance and significantly relieves your team of strenuous revenue cycle workflows.
AthenaClinicals (Electronic Medical Records)
During our analysis of the AthenaOne software, we found that the Interoperability tools help transmit patient records and data from one practitioner to another within or outside a practice. The athenaClinicals feature also provides note-taking functionalities that allow you to take down information about the patient before, during, and after examination or treatment.
AthenaClinicals can display relevant information such as patient allergies, medical history, frequency of visits, illnesses, vitals, and other data that can help make informed clinical decisions. You also order new labs, prescribe more medications, and add diagnoses for other practitioners to use when attending to the patients. This helps reduce the need for paperwork filings or inefficient communication.
Overall, this feature of the athenaOne software helps ensure clinical efficiency while enabling you to deliver excellent patient care.
AthenaCommunicator (patient engagement)
Mobile Application
The AthenaHealth platform has Health Apps for patients and practitioners and a patient portal for providers, staff, and patients to communicate seamlessly on one application. These apps are available on the Google play store for Androids, the Apple Store for iPhones and Ipads, and PC App for desktops and laptops.
SMS Integration
AthenaHealth takes the patient communication tool on the AthenaOne platform to another level with HIPAA-compliant messaging functionalities. This means that media and text messages shared on this application are encrypted while transmitted to and from mobile devices or workstations. It helps ensure patients can communicate seamlessly and keep in touch with their medical care practitioner.
Telehealth
The telehealth capabilities of this PMF software also allow healthcare providers to consult with patients virtually through cloud-based health information technology (HIT) and end-to-end secured one-on-one video interaction tool on the platform without needing an extra application.
Integrations
Athenahealth offers three types of API that support HL7®, FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard integrations, Certified FHIR API endpoints, and AthenaOne’s proprietary APIs for seamless connections that meet the development and functionality needs of users.
AthenaOne – AthenaOne has over 700 proprietary healthcare API endpoints that cover administrative, clinical, and financial functions.
FHIR APIs – RESTful FHIR APIS enables healthcare data to be shared across different software systems in a standardized manner. Additionally, Athenahealth’s FHIR APIs support 2-legged and 3-legged OAuth mechanisms, allowing app developers to build system-to-system or user-facing application flows. These APIs also support OAuth mechanisms to enable secure and flexible app development.
Certified APIs – AthenaHealth strongly believes that an open, collaborative ecosystem helps drive quality care outcomes, which is why they offer access to Certified APIs without extra charge for their existing customers and partners.
Current users of athenaOne, athenaClinicals, athenaCollector, and athenaOne for Hospitals and Health Systems have access to the Certified APIs through the Developer Portal, which can help build or integrate your software tools and applications.
Athenahealth also has some optional-use integrations such as the athenaCapture app for capturing and uploading images, Ingenico for handling the complete credit card payment ecosystem, Next Patient for extended online booking functionality, Rivia Health for billings, and DocResponse for digital check-in and clinical documentation.
Benefits of Using AthenaHealth Practice Management Software
Being a cloud-based PMS, the AthenaHealth software, AthenaOne, offers several significant advantages, some of which set it apart from other software. It combines essential features that assist with administrative and patient experience workflows. The benefits you can derive from these features include the following.
- Mobile functionalities for scheduling, e-prescription, and messaging
- Better operational efficiency
- Improvements in patient engagement
- Online scheduling with reminders for fewer no-shows
- Effective billing and claim management
Industry Capabilities
The AthenaHealth practice management software is ideal for healthcare practices of all sizes and specialties. It also supports various integrations that help improve its functionalities and performance.
AthenaHealth Pricing
AthenaHealth PMS promises to help reduce the cost of running healthcare practices with zero hidden charges. The platform offers two payment models; encounter-based and percentage-based pricing.
On the percentage-based pricing, medicare providers pay a certain percentage of their practice earnings to AthenaHealth. Percentages are usually calculated based on the volume of patients received, the value of claims processed, and the complexity of your billing cycle, among other variables.
The pricing per encounter is a collection-based model in which the software only charges for the number of appointments received periodically. This means that if your volume of appointments dips, your PMS fees will also reduce, allowing you to maintain equivalent cash flow.
The AthenaHealth team also offers a customized quote tailored to the number of practitioners and other specific practice needs, but users report a starting price of $140 per month per provider.
In Conclusion
Although AthenaHealth practice management software may be considered confusing to use, one good news is that they provide tutorial videos on how practitioners can effectively use the system for their specific roles. One major drawback is that the billing system requires you to have a billing staff to manage it, unlike other PMS that eliminate the need for staffing. Overall, AthenaHealth has all the features healthcare practices need to operate efficiently. It is the ideal software for small and large practices that want to leverage its collection or encounter-based pricing system to save on software costs.