Customer success experts share 5 must-haves for clinical efficiency
Clinical efficiency doesn’t come from software alone. Even the most robust electronic health record can frustrate users if they’re left to figure it out on their own.
To truly reduce administrative burden, streamline documentation, and help clinicians focus on patient care, healthcare organizations need more than outstanding EHR software. They need a healthcare IT (HIT) partner that actively checks in, coaches, and guides practices to make the most of their technology.
For athenaOne® customers, that’s exactly where athenahealth Customer Success Managers (CSMs) come in. CSMs act as long‑term partners, meeting regularly with practices, reviewing performance data, and sharing best practices drawn from thousands of organizations across the athenahealth network. Their goal: to help practices continuously optimize how they use athenaOne.
To understand what that optimization looks like in practice, we spoke with two seasoned CSMs: Betsy Young, who works with established customers, and Karen Lazare, who focuses on clients in their first year on athenaOne. Between them, they bring nearly four decades of experience helping healthcare practices succeed.
Drawing on their insights, here are five essentials your HIT partner should offer if clinical efficiency is your goal.
1. Built-in tools that meaningfully reduce documentation time
Any HIT vendor can claim to support clinical workflows. Fewer deliver tools that consistently shorten them.
An effective partner should demonstrate built-in accelerators in the EHR that reduce repetitive work and clicks, such as:
- Reusable documentation elements such as macros and saved findings
- Order sets that bundle commonly ordered labs, imaging, or medications
- Encounter-level tools that pre-document routine visits with a single action
“It’s usually a matter of helping clinicians get through their work faster,” Young explains. “So they can close encounters, stay current, and not feel buried by documentation.” For example, the saved findings tool in athenaOne allows the clinician to write and save blurbs about findings such as specific test results, so they’re able to copy and paste instead of typing it out every time.
Lazare adds that pre-built workflows matter most when they reflect real clinical patterns. “I use an 80/20 principle. If 80% of visits look the same, the system should support that,” she says. “You’re trimming clicks and minutes and repetitions off someone’s workflow and they can just keep moving faster.” She explains that athenaOne’s encounter plans allow the clinician to queue up a diagnosis code, X-rays or lab work, patient education, and more with a single click. “The faster they get through documentation and close the encounter, the faster the claim gets out the door,” she says.
The right HIT partner doesn’t just digitize documentation — it actively helps accelerate it.
2. Workflow optimization beyond the exam room
Clinical efficiency doesn’t stop when the visit ends. Lab results, patient messages, follow-ups, and internal tasks all compete for attention; and when workflows aren’t configured thoughtfully, important work can be delayed or missed.
A strong HIT partner helps practices:
- Configure inboxes so work routes to the right people
- Avoid bottlenecks caused by misrouted or unassigned tasks
- Ensure providers aren’t overloaded with work that support staff can handle
Young often sees practices where encounters are closed promptly but other work quietly piles up. “They may have thousands of patient cases or lab results that have never been closed out,” she says. She’ll encourage that practice to make sure a staff member is monitoring incomplete tasks, and help them set up task assignment overrides that let a medical assistant take certain tasks off a doctor’s plate.
True clinical efficiency requires visibility across all clinical work, not just encounters.
3. Actionable performance insights, not just raw metrics
Most EHRs generate data. Fewer help practices turn that data into meaningful action.
An effective HIT partner should provide:
- Clear clinical efficiency metrics such as documentation time and same-day encounter close rates
- Benchmarks that show how a practice compares to peers
- Context and guidance to interpret what the numbers really mean
“athenahealth’s metric is to have 80% of encounters closed the same day, but I expand that and look at 24 hours,” Young says. “The story behind the metric matters. Closing 90% within 24 hours is very different from leaving 20% of your charts open for weeks.”
Lazare coaches her customers with data from athenahealth’s athenaOne Insights Dashboards. She has seen practices use these insights to improve documentation quality and coding accuracy. Over time, those changes can improve both clinician experience and financial performance.
The difference-maker isn’t the dashboard itself. It’s having a partner who helps you understand what you’re seeing and act on it.
4. AI-enabled tools designed to improve efficiency
AI is no longer a future consideration for clinical teams: it’s becoming a practical lever for reducing administrative burden today. An effective HIT partner should offer AI-enabled tools that are purpose-built to improve efficiency, not novelty features that add complexity or risk.
That means AI tools that:
- Integrate directly into existing clinical workflows
- Reduce documentation time without sacrificing accuracy
- Support clinician review, oversight, and control
- Can be adopted gradually, based on comfort level and need
Some EHRs, including athenaOne’s, offer ambient clinical documentation, which captures the patient-provider conversation and helps organize notes automatically. When used thoughtfully, AI scribes like Ambient Notes allow clinicians to stay focused on the patient instead of the screen.
As Betsy Young puts it, adoption often varies widely by clinician: “Some love [AI], they can’t wait to get started, and others don’t want to touch it.”
What helps overcome hesitation is seeing how AI works in practice. When ambient tools remove irrelevant conversation and place information where it belongs in the note, clinicians begin to view them less as experimental technology and more as time-saving support.
Karen Lazare sees efficiency, not novelty, as the deciding factor for her clients. “My clients are very focused on where AI actually saves time,” she says. Her customers want tools that fit naturally into existing workflows and help documentation move faster, rather than creating new steps to manage.
The right HIT partner makes AI optional, transparent, and grounded in real clinical use. That way, practices can adopt efficiency-enhancing tools with confidence, at a pace that works for their team.
When your HIT partner combines smart design, actionable insights, thoughtful innovation, and ongoing human support, clinical efficiency stops being aspirational — and starts becoming achievable.
5. Ongoing partnership, not just implementation support
Perhaps the most overlooked requirement of an effective HIT partner is what happens after go-live.
Clinical efficiency isn’t achieved in a single training session. It evolves as practices grow, workflows change, and new features become available.
An effective partner should provide:
- A dedicated success resource who understands your practice
- Regular, data-informed check-ins
- Access to training, coaching, and peer resources
The Customer Success Managers say that their first and most important step is discovery: uncovering their customers’ specific pain points. “If you’re doing something that’s taking a good chunk of your day, tell me,” Lazare says. “I might be able to help, or find someone who can, but I won’t know unless you speak up.”
She continues, “We want the client to feel the value of the product and the value of the partnership they have with us. Making their life easy is a big win.”
Young adds, “Customer success is in our job title. Our goal is to make sure that you are successful on our system, and that means helping you find the resources to make sure that you learn.”
For complex clinical questions, Young refers her practices for one-on-one clinical coaching calls with an athenahealth EHR expert, so they can learn from highly trained and knowledgeable resources at no additional charge.
Beyond one-on-one support, community matters. Specialty-specific peer groups, shared best practices, and customer-driven product enhancements all contribute to a sense of partnership rather than isolation.
The most effective HIT relationships feel collaborative — not transactional.
Clinical efficiency is a partnership
Optimizing clinical workflows isn’t about squeezing more work into the day. It’s about removing friction so clinicians and staffs experience fewer clicks, fewer after-hours charts, and fewer tasks falling through the cracks.
When your HIT partner combines smart design, actionable insights, thoughtful innovation, and ongoing human support, clinical efficiency stops being aspirational — and starts becoming achievable.
Is it time to reevaluate your HIT partner?
If your current HIT software doesn’t support these capabilities or leaves your team to figure them out alone, it may be worth asking whether it’s still the right fit for your practice.
Clinical inefficiency rarely shows up all at once. It creeps in as longer documentation times, more after-hours charting, growing backlogs, and frustrated clinicians. Over time, those small friction points can add up to burnout, revenue leakage, and stalled growth.
Before renewing a contract or investing more time in workarounds, consider asking your HIT partner the following questions:
A quick checklist for evaluating your HIT partner
- Does the system actively reduce documentation time? Look for built-in accelerators like macros, saved findings, order sets, and encounter-level tools beyond free-text notes.
- Can clinical workflows be tailored beyond the exam room? Ask how inboxes, task routing, and follow-up work are configured. Find out how the system helps ensure work lands with the right person.
- Do we get actionable insights, not just reports? Benchmarking, clinical efficiency dashboards, and guidance on how to improve are just as important as the metrics themselves.
- Are AI-enabled tools available to improve efficiency today? Look for AI capabilities that are built into clinical workflows, demonstrably reduce documentation time, support clinician review and oversight — and allow clinicians to opt in when they’re ready.
- Do we have an ongoing partner, or just a help desk? Ask whether you’ll have a dedicated success resource who proactively reviews performance, suggests improvements, and connects you to training and peer best practices.
If the answers to these questions raise concerns, it may be time to explore a more collaborative approach to healthcare IT: one that pairs powerful technology with long-term partnership.
The right HIT partner doesn’t just install software. They help your practice continuously remove friction, adapt to change, and create a more sustainable day-to-day experience for clinicians.
