athenaClinicalsSM Update: Announcing the Clinical Content Initiative
Do your practice’s physicians follow clinical guidelines from memory? Are you confused about the requirements for evaluation and management coding? Taking too long to manage pay for performance initiatives?
We’re embarking on a broad and thoroughly exciting initiative at athenahealth. Even though athenaClinicals, athenahealth’s clinical cycle management service, is already getting rave reviews from clients, we’re setting out to make it even better.
This month, we established a new team to focus on “clinical content.” The team, headed by Andrea Nilsen, will develop specialty-focused content to guide practices from the beginning to the end of each patient visit.
“We’re focusing broadly on developing content that is meaningful to each specialty we serve,” said Nilsen. “Ultimately, athenaClinicals content will help providers maximize the effectiveness of their time with the patient, and ultimately the practice’s profitability.”
Right now, athenaClinicals provides templates for documenting patient exams, giving providers options for tailoring standard visits based on the needs of their practices. When the full suite of clinical content is embedded into athenaClinicals, providers will have access to specialty specific (and fully customizable) templates and clinical guidelines covering:
- Patient Past, Family, and Social History templates
- Clinical care and reimbursement related guidelines
- Review of Systems and Physical Exam templates
- Patient education
- Common, problem-based sets of orders
Through Pay for Performance enrollment and management, we’ll embed clinical guidelines into patient visit templates, so you’ll never have to remember (or look up) the latest performance measurements. “Providers will immediately see each patient’s history during each visit, and whether they are due for a recommended preventive screening or problem specific test,” said Nilsen. These guidelines appear based on the patient’s age, gender, and past medical history, so relevant suggestions are made at the right time for the right patients.
And it gets better. With athenahealth’s clinical content, we can provide feedback on the evaluation and management level performed based on the documentation of the patient’s visit.
“Access to global content is not something other EMR vendors are providing,” said Nilsen. “With other systems, you typically pay extra just to build templates for the physical exam.” athenahealth’s approach is to build a continually updated “clinical library” that will be accessible to all clients at no additional cost. “That way, our clients benefit from the network effect no matter what the size of their practice.”
More than 130 providers have gone live with athenaClinicals in family medicine, internal medicine, OB/GYN, and orthopedics. Last month, our first ENT providers got started with athenaClinicals. This month, the product and implementation teams are preparing to implement many more orthopedic providers and have kicked off research and development for our cardiology practices.