athenaClinicals Update
With 39 live providers and 250 more being added by the end of 2007, athenaClinicals is spreading quickly and clients are satisfied so far! Kevin Tolin Scheper, Director of Clinical Implementation Services at athenahealth gives an update on how athenahealth's newest client service is fairing.
Athena Pulse: For your clients and prospects that are not very familiar with athenaClinicals, can you give us a brief explanation of athenahealth's unique approach to the EMR?
Kevin Tolin Scheper: In line with our approach to revenue cycle management, athenaClinicals is focused on delivering results. The first component of athenaClinicals is a state-of-the-art EMR that is web-based and fully hosted by athenahealth. Physicians can personalize athenaClinicals to reflect their distinct workflows while benefiting from an extensive list of EMR functions including a full online health record and support for both electronic and paper input.
aP: I've heard that EMR adoption overall has been low. Why is this?
KTS: We believe it is a problem with the traditional EMR model. The industry is not approaching this sector the right way. Software simply isn't enough to achieve the goals of increasing revenue and cutting costs. The result is a highly unpredictable ROI. Unlike traditional software EMR packages, athenaClinicals extracts the administrative work that consumes so many resources and allows our clients to focus on work directly related to patient care. Our virtual back office scans and categorizes every incoming fax. It then matches clinical documents to existing patients and patient orders, enters select data, routes information to the appropriate staff members, and stores documents where they can be readily accessed again. The scanned forms are entered into athenaNet®, resulting in coded, patient-centric data. Finally, athenahealth sends out (either electronically or via fax) reviewed and approved documents, renewals, and authorizations, relieving practice staff of this activity.
aP: So athenahealth takes over the paperwork?
KTS: Yes. A typical provider receives 75-100 pieces of paper a day. That's 2,000-3,000 pieces of paper per provider per month. With our 39 providers currently live on athenaClinicals, we processed over 45,000 documents in December alone. Twenty thousand of the documents were paper documents and the other 25,000 were electronic as a result of athenahealth's interfaces with 75% of client's labs and 90% of clients' pharmacies. With athenaClinicals, paper congestion - the plague of every physician practice - is eliminated. And not only is the documentation process streamlined, but practices gain the process control and follow-through that are critical elements of reducing professional liability.
aP: Can you speak to the revenue side?
KTS: Another feature of athenaClinicals that traditional software products don't have is a knowledge base that is updated daily, adding "intelligence" to EMRs. The knowledge base provides practices with information such as the most current billing rules for E&M, specialty, and procedure-based coding and payer rules for drug formulary. By providing clients with the most up-to-date payer and clinical rules, cleaner charges are created which leads to increased revenue.
aP: What are some of your results to date?
KTS: We began bringing our early beta client live in the summer of 2006. Currently we have 39 providers live on athenaClinicals representing 11 practices in the areas of internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and neurology. We have been working closely with existing clients to collect feedback in order to improve both the software and our revolutionary services. Additionally, we survey our clients semi-annually about how they feel about athenahealth's software, services, and people. One question we ask to gauge our performance is, "Would you refer athenahealth to trusted friend and colleague?" While some of our clients felt it was too early to judge athenaClinicals, the majority of our clients were already seeing enough results with athenaClinicals to refer their trusted colleagues to athenahealth. We're thrilled to have so much positive feedback and support this early in the process!
aP: That's great! What are your plans moving forward in 2007?
KTS: We are on target to add more than 250 providers representing over 50 practices to the athenaClinicals platform this year. New specialties being added include OB/GYN, orthopaedics, and cardiology. As more of our clients go live with athenaClinicals, we look forward to working closely with them to make their experience with athenaClinicals as rewarding as possible. And as always, we rely on our clients to provide feedback to us as we aim to constantly improve our services as they evolve.
For more information on athenaClinicals, click here.