An orthopedic clinic finds agility and efficiency with athenaOne®

Shawna Joseph can’t imagine doing her job without athenaOne. Joseph, who manages Advantage Orthopedic & Sports Medicine Clinic in her role as CEO, was recruited to the job years ago, in part to get the clinic up-and-running on athenaOne, which had recently been selected from among several other healthcare solutions on the market.

After a decade on the solution, athenaOne has become essential to how every staff member at Advantage works each day. The all-in-one solution—which integrates capabilities for practice and revenue cycle management, electronic health records, and patient engagement—provides comprehensive support for Advantage’s daily operational needs and has helped the team become more efficient, focused, and profitable. It also helps the clinic understand it’s financial performance month-to-month, including where it stands compared to peers. On the clinical side, athenaOne’s EHR product has helped streamline patient encounters, and has significantly reduced providers’ documentation time.

With athenaOne at its core, the team at Advantage now manages billing more efficiently, and with greater insight into their financial performance. And the clinic’s orthopedic specialists can now serve more patients and spend less time documenting encounters (especially after-hours), a more profitable balance for this thriving practice.

Shortening documentation time so providers can serve more patients and get time back in their day

Advantage Orthopedic & Sports Medicine made the decision to implement the athenaOne solution in 2015. Shawna Joseph, who joined around the same time, was already familiar with athenaOne—having managed multiple clinics, she’d had the opportunity to try several different solutions, and athenaOne was at the top of her list.

Part of the reason for Joseph’s enthusiasm for athenaOne was the efficiencies she knew it could bring to the clinic overall, and specifically to the busy providers she was coming on to support.

One example is athenaOne’s orthopedic-specific workflows and documentation tools, which have changed how the physicians and other providers in the office go about their work. For example, Advantage’s high patient volumes used to mean that providers were spending as many as 3 hours per day completing documentation after patient visits were over; often, the work had to be brought home and completed during evenings or weekends. It was too much tedious work, and certainly not the kind of work the providers at Advantage had gotten into orthopedics to do.

“Before using athenaOne, many of our providers' biggest complaints were around documentation. Our physicians are not documentation people—they are 'take care of patients' people. So, the quicker the process of getting the documentation done, the better,” said Joseph.

The solution has been athenaOne’s Dictation tool, which uses speech-to-text technology to produce accurate notes quickly. Whether on their phone or at their desk, the providers at Advantage can now simply verbalize their notes and they are captured in athenaOne’s EHR product with 99% accuracy.

Other acceleration tools like content templates and text macros offer additional ways to document encounters more quickly and accurately than was possible before. These innovative tools have helped the clinic gain so much efficiency that they can now see more patients throughout the day.

“One of our physicians actually ran a test to see how long it would take him to see 20 patients in a day while completing documentation between appointments,” said Joseph. “When he switched to using athenaOne and Dictation, he was able to save an hour and 15 minutes each day, and only had to stay an hour after he was done seeing patients, whereas before he would often stay 3 hours and maybe even take work home.”

That’s great for work-life balance. It’s also great for the clinic’s financial health. 

“Being able to see three additional patients each day, and then document those visits in-office, translates to something like $120,000 each year in revenue,” said Joseph.

Simplifying medical billing, from authorizations to performance reporting

Another big reason for Shawna Joseph’s affinity for athenaOne is its ease of use. The comprehensive solution centralizes the team’s work by combining capabilities that support the clinic’s core functions, including an award-winning ambulatory EHR,¹ a revenue cycle management product and services to facilitate efficient and profitable practice management, and embedded patient engagement capabilities that provide patients with an excellent digital experience.

Crucially, Joseph knew that the athenaOne RCM product and the support teams behind it would provide the capabilities and expertise she needed to manage the complex operations and collections work typical of an orthopedic practice.

“I'm always amazed at how awesome athena is at backing us up on all aspects of billing,” said Joseph.

One aspect in particular is prior authorizations. Due to its high patient volumes, along with the complex and often costly procedures the clinic performs, efficient insurance authorizations are important for keeping procedure wait times low and the reimbursement cycle short.

To do so, the athenaOne Authorization Rules Engine now automatically checks new orders for insurance authorization, rather than those authorizations being managed over the phone or via payer portals by in-house staff. The system has a greater than 98% success rate in managing authorizations, so Joseph and her team are confident that their orders will be approved quickly, and that the claims they submit are clean and accurate. The clinic can now handle even higher numbers of patients than before, with only one staff member focused on billing work.

Another major benefit of using athenaOne has been the visibility it provides into the clinic’s financial performance.

“As a CEO, I feel that the reporting capability is just unbelievably amazing,” said Joseph. “It's the 1st of the month. It's 5:00 p.m. And I've got all my reporting done from the previous month. It's just like, wow, that used to be a 14-day process.”

athenaOne’s performance reporting is crucial for Advantage, which operates in a competitive market, as most orthopedists do. The up-to-date information from athenaOne tells them how the clinic is doing, and where they might find new opportunities for revenue.

“I just feel like I have unlimited support and unlimited availability to create anything that I need to present to the physicians to allow them to see how they are competing in the market or how they're competing against their peers on benchmarking,” said Joseph. “They're very competitive and they're really interested in that kind of performance information.”

The billing support athenaOne provides doesn’t just save Joseph and her team time. It has also significantly shortened the clinic’s revenue cycle, meaning they’re now paid much faster for the services they provide.

“When I came on here, they were using a different system. At that time, they were waiting an average of 75 days for money to come in. Within 120 days of using athenaOne, we got it down to 28 days,” said Joseph.

Overall, the decision to use athenaOne has paid off.