I’m Todd Park, co-founder of athenahealth. I know that by now you’ve probably heard quite a bit about the frustrations associated with converting to Electronic Health Records: time consuming transitions, big up-front investments in hardware and software, costly system maintenance and upgrades and the need to learn new ways of documenting clinical encounters – just to name a few. With most EHR solutions, productivity, profitability and morale can all be compromised.

At athenahealth, we’ve embraced the promise of EHRs, but we are also very aware of the potential headaches in adopting them. Despite the incentives of the HITECH Act and other programs, those headaches won’t magically disappear. That’s why we’ve created an EHR that minimizes the hurdles of adoption and maximizes the long-term benefits to your practice.

With athenaClinicals, our innovative web-based EHR service, you can become a truly paperless practice. You get online patient record keeping, lab connectivity, clinical fax categorization and routing, intuitive reporting and benchmarking and much more. There’s no expensive hardware or software to install or maintain, and it’s flexible enough for you to document clinical encounters the way you like – with a pen, keyboard or voice dictation.

And because it’s integrated with athenaCollector, our physician billing and practice management service, overall workflow is simplified and the bottom line improvements begin almost immediately. In fact, with athenaClinicals, some practices realize a positive ROI in their first year.

Here’s how it works:

Most EHR products are client-server based, which means they require added cost for hardware, set up, maintenance, and software. Not ours. athenaClinicals is web-based, so the only tools you need are the ones you’re already using: a PC with an Internet browser. Patient information and medical histories are easily accessible at the point of care. You can see which patient lab and test orders are done and ready for review and which are overdue. And you can, of course, access records and test results remotely, which increases practice efficiency, allows greater responsiveness to patients and improves your quality of life.

With our e-Prescribing functionality, you can submit orders to retail and mail order pharmacies, and view medication history, formulary, and benefit information.

And because our software is web-based, we’re able to continually incorporate changing industry requirements and government mandates – such as pay for performance opportunities and the government’s HITECH Act – without expensive software updates or delays. All of these rules are maintained and constantly updated in our real-time rules database – which make our clients’ workflows more productive and efficient.

This database brings together a real-time collection of payer rules with a comprehensive and continually updated set of clinical guidelines, protocols and drug formulary rules. The database also delivers drug interaction alerts, drug allergy alerts, and reporting data when and where you really need it – at the point of care.

The rules database also includes coding and workflow rules that remind you to perform and document the tasks that are necessary to satisfy pay for performance requirements – even as the healthcare landscape changes. Our intelligence team updates the rules database constantly – so each day you are accessing more and more up to date clinical information without having to do a thing.

And this team is just a part of the robust set of back-office service specialists who help our clients get the maximum benefit from athenaClinicals.

With athenaClinicals, a dedicated support team helps get you up and running, answers questions, and leads regular status meetings through the implementation and training process to ensure a smooth transition.

Once you’re set-up, our Document Services team takes on your most labor-intensive and time-consuming administrative tasks. We scan and categorize every incoming fax for you, dramatically reducing paper clutter. We match clinical documents to patient orders, let you know which orders are still outstanding, enter select data, route information to appropriate staff members, and post documents where they can be readily accessed. We also build and maintain electronic interfaces to labs, pharmacies, hospitals and medical imaging archive systems– providing seamless communication, faster turnaround and fewer hassles.

Our team of specialists monitors your practice’s performance over the long term, sharing best practices and providing ongoing, fresh insights into how to improve practice performance.

All of this hard work behind the scenes eliminates paper congestion, improves process control, frees up your staff to do more high-value work, and improves patient care.

So there you have it. Thanks for taking the time to learn about athenaClinicals. Contact us today to find out more about how your practice can transition to Electronic Health Records without sacrificing profitability - or sanity.