I’m one of the founders of Florida Woman Care and we started this, my partner and myself Dr. Kenneth Konsker as a two doctor practice. We grew the practice throughout most counties throughout the State of Florida.

We started this company on January 1, 2009 single specialty obstetrics and gynecology. At the end of the first year we were 38 physicians, at the end of the second year we were 158 physicians and now we’re breaking 260 physicians with another 105 midlevels.

The concept was to start a large single specialty group so that we could negotiate for better rates with the payers.

Most physicians want to be part of Florida Woman Care because they feel protected. When groups coalesce we have great market share and with greater market share we have greater leverage. I think you’re seeing that the hospitals are trying to buy doctor’s practices so physicians are looking for a solution.

You need a great practice management software that’s going to allow the interconnectivity to the offices and more importantly physicians want to be able to see their own claims and they want to see their own collections and that’s what athenahealth does.

We were starting to grow on a faster, more rapid level so we needed someone who had the skill set and the infrastructure to allow us to grow more rapidly with them.

Within four or five days when you see the EOBs coming in we’ve taken that moment and we just have run with it.

My history in coming from different practice management systems the biggest frustration was that there was a lot of data that I couldn’t get my hands on. What I really liked about athenahealth was the fact that everything is self contained and right on the screen for me, I just double click on to a hyper link and it opens up all the detail behind that. I can actually drill down to a single claim and find out exactly how many claims there are, who the patients are, I can see all the activities that happened.

I submit my bill, athenahealth checks real time to make sure that I’ve submitted it correctly, that there’s nothing wrong with my claim. If there is a problem with my claim it will let me know and give me some instructions in terms of how to fix it and then it gets sent off and it goes off to what I call “athena land” and usually three of four weeks later I’m seeing my collection.

Our model gives you the ability to spend more time with patients. With higher reimbursements you don’t feel that conveyor belt mentality in your office where you’re just going patient after patient.

The money is important, we’re all trying to be successful in business, nobody argues that fact. But it can’t be always about the money, it’s got to be about the experience. We looked at a number of different systems that were out there, we looked at Digicharts, we looked at ECW, some that were “free”, some that were very low cost but didn’t have a lot of features. athenahealth of course was our frontrunner, we figured any EMR that they had followed the same logic that the collector did. And I think in the end the decision came down to who did we trust and we trusted athenahealth.

I go in with my trusty little laptop, take the history, do the physical examination, document it all while I’m in the room, put in my orders including imaging and prescriptions. I hit submit, sign orders and I move onto the next patient. Florida Woman Care has been amazing for me, they really kind of took my hand, walked me through the process of setting up an office, got me linked up with athenahealth for my billing and my collections and now with athenaClinicals and it’s been a great experience all across the board.

We have a tremendous opportunity to change health care here. What we’re trying to do is not replicate the mistakes that have been made in the past which is bigger is not necessarily better. We want to be bigger but we want to be usually successful, we want to use information technology and we want to make doctor’s lives easier.