athenaCommunicator

Overview

Better patient communication makes for happy patients and a healthier bottom line.

Patients today expect convenient, 24/7 access to your practice and their health care information through a range of communication channels. But most practices are already overwhelmed with excessive phone traffic and administrative tasks.

Our Web-based system and services go well beyond medical scheduling software, improving all patient interactions outside of the office and leading to better access, care, and profitability. Through integration with athenaClinicals^SM and athenaCollector^®, our electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and medical billing services, athenaCommunicator^® helps you drive revenue and save staff time across the patient workflow.

Your practice can become more competitive, compliant, and accessible to your patients while improving your bottom line with our unique approach to medical scheduling software:

• Secure and compliant patient messaging via the Web, email, and cell phones
• Expanded accessibility for patients after-hours and on weekends
• Improved self pay revenue stream and soft collections process
• Re-captured staff and physician time
• athenahealth operators for after-hours patient calls redirected from our automated messaging platform
• Elimination of expensive paper-based mailing campaigns
• Reduced no-shows and improved arrival rates
• Better managed patient health
• Enhanced patient engagement

Unlike standard medical scheduling software, our system can also help your practice meet key HITECH Act “meaningful use” requirements for improving patient engagement – allowing you to receive significant HITECH Act incentives.

How athenaCommunicator Works
We manage patient interactions triggered by your staff or by automated routines within athenaNet^®. From a centralized inbox, appropriate users can view a record of all patient communications conducted via our patient web portal, automated messaging platform, or an athenahealth operator. Unlike our competitors’ medical scheduling software and services, athenaCommunicator is centrally hosted — so you don’t need to invest in costly software, servers, or phone lines.

athenaCommunicator includes:

• Automated Messaging Platform
• Patient Web Portal
• Live Operator Services
• Self-Pay Reminder Service

To learn more, contact athenahealth

Automated Messaging Platform

Reduce no-shows, optimize your daily schedule, and boost your bottom line.

Free up valuable time — and better manage patient health — with a patient reminder system that sends phone calls and emails to your patients for appointment reminders, past due balance alerts, disease management initiatives, and other compliance-driven campaigns.

Top among medical practice complaints is the inability to reach patients by phone during office hours and have calls returned. Physicians also complain that patients often don’t remember what they’re told, don’t understand instructions, or don’t comply with treatment plans.

By using athenahealth’s secure, Automated Messaging Platform for patient reminders of all kinds, your practice can ensure that discussions in the exam room are followed up on later to ensure continuity of care. The system can also be used to provide your patients with lab results that don’t need a lot of explanation as well as referrals to other offices.

A medical practice can also free up valuable staff time by using widely accepted automated calls to send patient reminders about medication schedules to specific patient groups. Automated calls can also be used in the event of a weather closure or an event such as an immunization clinic. Giving patients the information they need saves time and aggravation. Automated messaging can also be used to increase revenue by sending patient reminders to no-shows to reschedule.

athenahealth’s integrated messaging solutions include:

To learn more, contact athenahealth

Patient Web Portal

Patient access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.

Patients are increasingly demanding 24-7, secure and convenient, online access to their doctors and to health care information. The Patient Web Portal is designed to meet that demand. We’ll build a branded Web-based portal for your practice and work with you to make patient adoption of this new tool successful. You can give your patients efficient, 24-hour, Web-based access to schedule appointments, retrieve test results, view personal health information, update insurance and demographic information, view educational health content, review financial statements, make secure credit card payments, and more.

Your practice can save a significant amount of time by using secure communications with patients through a Patient Web Portal. Patients can fill out online forms before appointments as well as link to their electronic medical records. They can update their own contact information, such as new mobile phone numbers and mailing addresses, eliminating the problem of maintaining up-to-date contact information. They can request prescriptions and take secure delivery of test results.

With athenaCommunicator^®, you’ll get a Patient Web Portal that adopts your practice’s look and feel, complete with your logo and branding. With more and more people going online for health information, your portal can also become a source of online health information for them – more accurate and trusted information than they might find using a random search. Through its partner, Healthwise, one of the nation’s leading providers of health content, athenahealth makes is possible for your patients to find information regarding injuries, conditions, symptoms, and preventative care. Delivering such information via your own Patient Web Portal provides an opportunity to increase existing patient loyalty, attract new patients, and enable patient wellness.

At little cost, a Patient Web Portal can keep your practice’s doors open, virtually, 24/7, providing patients with the kind of access they’ve come to expect from their banks and other online businesses.

To learn more, contact athenahealth

Live Operator Services

athenaCommunicator^® Operator Services – Expand accessibility for your patients.

Patients have busy schedules and often don’t have the ability to contact your office during traditional office hours. Using our ReminderCall^SM and GroupCall^SM services, your practice has the ability to proactively generate outbound messaging events to your Patients in the evenings when it is most convenient for them. Our clients today use these services for campaigns like appointment confirmations, collections, appointment re-calls, and appointment cancellations.

Now imagine that a live person is standing by in our athenahealth call center waiting to assist those Patients if needed. When your Patient receives a ReminderCall or GroupCall and wants to take action immediately by rescheduling their appointment or paying their bill they simply press a button on their telephone keypad and are connected immediately to a well-trained athenahealth operator with visibility and access to the same athenanet screens that your staff uses daily. And all of this is happening after-hours while your office is closed.

When you purchase athenaCommunicator, at no additional charge, our implementation team will work with your staff to set up these automated messaging programs. They’ll ensure that our operators have well-defined call handling protocols should you choose to use them for any Patient encounters that have been re-directed from your ReminderCall or GroupCall campaigns.

And coming soon – Virtual Receptionist

athenahealth is also building a new service for our Clients called Virtual Receptionist. For an additional per-minute fee, this service will allow our athenahealth operators to intelligently handle patient calls that have been forwarded to us from your office during office hours and after hours. We know that the sheer volume of calls that come into your practice each day can be a major distraction and expense. Additionally, we have found that hold times, transfers and sending patients to voice mail can be a major point of patient dissatisfaction. Having highly trained athenahealth operators at your disposal (using the same athenaNet screens used by your staff) during peak days and hours of the week can provide a timely solution to this growing problem.

To learn more, contact athenahealth

Self-Pay Reminder Service

Improve collection rates and your self-pay days in accounts receivable.

Medical practices report an almost universal frustration with medical billing management when it comes to payment and insurance snags. Patients feel the pain, too. As self-pay accounts for a greater and greater proportion of practice revenue, it’s more important than ever to have a system to help you secure patient payments promptly and without hassle.

With athenaCommunicator’s Self-Pay Reminder Service, patients can see a clearly explained billing statement, keep track of their balance, and make payments. Your practice can improve collection rates and self-pay days in accounts receivable with scheduled messaging based on balance amounts and aging thresholds. Automated balance due reminders via phone and email, coupled with “soft” collection letters delivered via the Patient Web Portal, improve the speed of collection, the amount collected, and overall medical billing management.

Many practices struggle with the problem of self-pay collections and need an efficient way to capture more self-pay dollars before writing them off or involving a collection agency. athenahealth’s Self-Pay Reminder Service helps you capture this missed revenue and does so in a way that eliminates costly mailings and staff time.

When you sign up for this service, you will never pay for another paper statement again. At our expense, we’ll create and mail paper statements on your behalf while we help you to move patients to your Patient Portal to receive financial updates and make payments electronically. We’ll also initiate a self-pay reminder service that delivers a series of phone calls, text messages, emails and electronic “soft” collection letters at key moments in the self-pay revenue cycle to ensure secure self-payments faster than ever.

Using this service, your practice can improve overall medical billing management, avoid statement fees, and provide electronic statements to your patient portal users and paper statements to your non-portal users. You can set up automated group collection campaigns via phone, email, and Patient Portal, and use athenahealth’s Live Operator Services to handle pay-by-phone bounce-outs from those campaigns. Finally, you can send “soft” collection letters through the portal and provide patients with a way to easily make online credit and debit card payments.

To learn more, contact athenahealth