I think switching to an EHR for most physicians can be very difficult. I think the biggest thing is the cost, most physicians think once you switch to an EHR system immediately your costs are going to go up, there’s a lot of overhead, you’re going to not be able to see as many patients in the same amount of time, therefore your revenue will drop. athenahealth was very good at preemptively dealing with those issues. I think the biggest advantage with athenaClinicals is the ease of use. It’s very physician friendly because most physicians aren’t too computer savvy which I think is one of the biggest fears of adopting a system is people think you need to know a lot about computers. But it’s very intuitive, it’s very easy to use, and it really replicates the forms we were using on paper, which I think set it apart from the other systems that we looked at, or able to deliver much better care, quicker care. Results are coming in faster; we’re getting back to patients quicker with results. Being a web based system, if I’m at the hospital at 3:00 in the morning doing a delivery and patient calls with a problem I can log on, look up her last visit, her results. Which prior to that, you’d have to drive to the office, unlock it, go in, find her chart. The document management has been huge because we really have cut our staff by two just by cutting down the number of office people taking faxes, finding charts, putting the fax in a chart, putting it on our desk. And now all that’s done by athena so it would on average take us a week to ten days to get to a pap smear or mammogram, to get those results to a patient. Now patients are getting results within two to three days.

As far as pay for performance and those types of programs, I think athenaClinicals is going to make it much easier to track. The type of data that you’re going to need to submit to these insurance companies to participate in their programs and having athena give you the ability to, with a few clicks, be able to pull up -- run reports on certain types of labs and test results is just something you can’t replicate it on paper. So that really has made a huge difference. A real big advantage with athena is they listen, they’ve done the research, they know the potential problems and really address all those issues before you go live.