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 athenaClinicalsSM and athenaCollectorSM, 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
- Outsourced athenahealth operators for extended-hour and overflow call handling
- 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:
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:
ReminderCallSM
Generate patient reminder messages about appointments with pre-appointment instructions. Reduce your no-show rate and eliminate the costs and hassles of traditional reminder systems.
GroupCallSM
Create broadcast outreach campaigns to select patient groups regarding annual
visit reminders, weather-related office closures, disease management messages,
and more.
ResultsCallSM
Securely deliver test results to patients without time-consuming phone calls from your office. Avoid the frustration and inefficiency of phone tag.
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
Patients can always speak with a live person – and it doesn’t have to be someone on your staff.
Patients have busy schedules and often need to contact your office when it’s closed. If you have a live operator standing by in the evening, patients can make urgent appointments for the following morning as well as regular appointments at a time when it’s convenient for them. And a live operator after hours can also take credit card payments and review eligibility and insurance matters with your patients – things stand-alone patient communication software just can’t handle.
Giving your patients live access to your practice when only a human voice on the line will do is vital to the success of your practice. Leveraging the benefits of athenahealth’s centrally-hosted, Web-based platform, our highly trained employees can act as virtual receptionists for your practice. This adds a level of service above and beyond patient communication software. With virtual access to the same athenaNet® screens used by your staff, our athenahealth operators can answer patient calls on your behalf and provide convenient and intelligent assistance, easing the burden of high call volume on your staff.
A virtual receptionist can re-route and handle overflow calls during peak office hours, too, when patients would otherwise be put on hold for long periods, ensuring you provide the best customer service and don’t lose business due to lack of responsiveness.
Beyond what patient communication software can offer, your patients get convenient, intelligent operator phone access to your practice and improved speed of response, while your staff is relieved of the burden of handling countless phone calls.
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
) require a simple, one-time registration.