Client Success Story: Leveraging a Clinical Network for Improved Outcomes
“I now wake up each morning and check on how things are going across the enterprise.” Dr. Thomas Mohr, Founder of Pediatric Partners
After establishing Pediatric Partners in 2000, a single-site practice with three physicians northeast of San Diego, Dr. Thomas Mohr quickly became frustrated with massive front- and back-office inefficiencies. So in 2001, he found athenahealth, Inc., and its web-based practice management and billing service, athenaCollectorSM.
Immediately upon switching to athenaCollector, the practice could leverage the collective billing and payer knowledge of thousands of providers using the system nationwide. The practice’s denials started decreasing and DAR was reduced by over 40%.
Gaining a Comparative Advantage
Pediatric Partners has since acquired and absorbed new practices, including four competing groups. Today, the medical group has 10 locations, over 20 physicians, sees 86,000 patients a year, and has revenue approaching $10 million compared to $600,000 in 2000.
“athenahealth gave us the tools and knowledge needed for our group’s brand to grow within the community, all while implementing leading workflow processes that resulted in consistent and measurable financial outcomes,” said Mohr. “During our growth we looked to implement new clinical technologies and decided to deploy a software-based EMR.”
Trial and Error
The medical group installed a software-based EMR in early 2003 in two of their locations and soon experienced typical outcomes from the traditional clinical software.
“Our staff went through extensive training and we also hired outside consultants to help them utilize the software,” says Mohr. “It wasn’t long after it went live that the staff was experiencing growing frustration, which only compounded as new software versions required substantial capital investments in hardware and upgrades. As our practice grew, so did the cost of operating the system.”
In 2005, Pediatric Partners felt they needed a new clinical solution, and turned to athenahealth’s athenaClinicalsSM – a unique EMR service that is built on the same web-based platform as athenaCollector, and combines intuitive software with results-oriented services to deliver improved and predictable outcomes and a return on investment.
Network Power and the New “Paperless”
Soon after implementing athenaClinicals, Pediatric Partners experienced something beyond just improved clinical workflow. With the unique synergy between athenaClinicals and athenaCollector, the services easily integrated all the moving parts of the practice, from scheduling to clinical task management, into a single clinical workflow system.
“Even with all your labs coming in electronically, there is still a massive amount of paper that comes into any medical office. Having a centrally-hosted EMR service that scans and categorizes every incoming fax, then matches clinical documents to existing patients and patient orders has given our group an incredible amount of process control on both the clinical and operational fronts, not to mention athenahealth now manages the connectivity to our labs and pharmacies, which has significantly reduced the number of calls to our practices,” Mohr boasts.
Along with eliminating a practice’s paper congestion, athenaClinicals provides the typical features of a traditional EMR software system, including CCHIT certification. All clients across athenahealth’s national client base simultaneously use the same version of the service-based application, which connects them to the athenahealth rules engine. This proprietary clinical and payer rules database is updated daily by athenahealth experts, and is inserted into a practice workflow to make sure the appropriate data is captured and that physicians receive maximum reimbursement.
“athenahealth’s EMR service is built on the same result-driven approach that allowed our group to flourish. athenaClinicals demands consistency from the practice to address the clinical work buckets in the workflow dashboard and allows us to tie provider compensation to how well they work their buckets,” said Mohr. “I now have real-time visibility into all of my practices, giving me the ability to manage my staff at the user level. I now wake up each morning and check on how things are going across the enterprise and since the system is centrally hosted, I can access this data from anywhere.”
The results Pediatric Partners Medical Group experienced using athenaClinicals have been impressive and immediate. However, they are not stopping there. Looking to the future, along with athenahealth, they are developing new order sets and templates that will allow them to comply with new health plan contracts and mandates, like various consumer-directed initiatives, further maximizing revenue through the clinical encounter.
Check out the athenaClinicals update in this issue for more on our unique EMR solution.