Inside Anderson Hills Pediatrics' seamless EHR move

Kaley Meadows is the Practice Administrator of Anderson Hills Pediatrics, a pediatric organization in Ohio. Read on to learn how Anderson Hills Pediatrics approached a major EMR transition, used athenaOne® to improve patient engagement and financial performance, and gave providers flexibility with documentation, including AI-supported workflows.

Q: What led your practice to make the switch to athenaOne?

A: Our previous EHR had been in place from 2008, so it had been 12, 13 years for our practice to become ingrained in the workflows of our previous EHR. And this was a big change for us.

We had the perfect storm brewing for us. We were in the midst of COVID whenever we decided to make a transition with our EMR, but at that time, we had servers that were coming to end-of-life. I had had a physician who had customized our previous EMR very extensively that wanted to retire, so I needed a physician plan for him.

And we also, over time, had tacked on several different services to allow our patients to have the portal and a way to self-schedule and for our records to be released to different entities. And so, we were looking for an opportunity to try to consolidate all of that together as we were looking to make this transition.

One of the things that was really a deciding factor to us is there was a practice within our community that had been utilizing athenaOne and one that just opened their doors to us and said, come on in. And they showed us the good, the bad and the ugly, answered all of our questions, and really eased our concerns of what this new EMR might look like for us. And ultimately, I think that relationship and the ability to see really what we were getting into in a similar practice made all the difference for us.

Q: How has athenaOne helped you address those challenges?

A: Our goal initially was to eliminate servers, create a succession plan for our IT support in regards to customization to our EMR, and consolidate third-party vendors. Since we’ve made the transition to athenaOne, we have a system that is easily customizable and works in various ways for our providers. We accomplished that goal.

We have reduced our vendors significantly, with a goal within the next year to fully be on athenaOne without any third-party support. And we are now cloud-based and have been in the process of shutting down all of those old servers that were still lingering from years past.

I think the experience has been better than what we ultimately could have expected. What’s been the most fun in this whole process is once you start to settle past the newness, then you can sit back and say, what do we want to do next? What could the system offer? But also what of our workflows could we do differently and the system could actually support us in getting there. And that’s been just the cool, fun, rewarding experience of it all.

I also remember very vividly wondering again, is this the right decision that we could have made? And we were interviewing a new provider to join our practice, and I had physicians as part of that interview panel that were excited to tell these candidates that we were using athenaOne, and how much these candidates would love it if they were to join our practice. And that was just a rewarding moment to realize that we made the right decision as we made this transition.

Q: How has athenaOne changed the way your practice operates financially and administratively?

A: In the last year, we’ve really focused on big changes on how our practice operates financially within athenaOne. One piece I was never expecting from an administrative and even financial perspective is the amount of data that we have available to track and trend what’s happening within our practice.

We found that AR was getting a little away from us and have really spent a lot of time focusing on workflow issues that we need to address from a billing perspective. Are there pieces we need to engage our patients with to help them in making sure that their bills are paid for? And then also, we can track and trend our goals with our front office team to make sure that we’re accomplishing the expectations and celebrating whenever they have success.

Like 80% of patients are putting a credit card on file at each and every visit. So that’s really changed a lot of how we operate financially. I also think the self check-in platform and the ability for patients to provide us with their insurance cards ahead of time has helped a lot in getting claims out the door to the right payers with the right eligibility information.

Administratively, I never thought I would be the data nerd that loves to have reports and information at my fingertips, but we are able to track and trend and see the pulse of the practice and make adjustments and changes where we need to. We’ve also done a lot of work on how we outreach to our patients to make sure that they’re up to date for preventative care. Are they getting their vaccines timely? We’ve even used communications with [athenaOne's Patient Portal] to let families know of formula recalls when we knew we provided samples within our visits. And I think the ease and the ability to connect with our patients has been a huge change from an administrative perspective in those calls to patients that we no longer have to make.

Q: What impact has athenaOne had on providers and clinical workflows, including AI?

A: Clinically, what I can see different for our team is historically, we were operating within a framework that was set by another physician within the practice. As we’ve transitioned to athenaOne, we have a template or an encounter plan that our team can use. But how they get to the documentation in the end can be a little bit of what works best for them.

So we have a provider that’s utilizing Ambient Notes and [another] AI solution. I’ve got another that leans heavily on text macros and documents a lot in that way. And I have others that are really quick at just hand typing as they go through their visits. So, I love that each of them have the flexibility to get to where they ultimately want to be.

I also think during the onboarding process, the opportunity for our providers to meet with a coaching team after go-live and have that opportunity at any point in time to be coached has been really helpful in finding some ways to accelerate their documentation time so that they can spend more time with the patients. We are surveying our providers once a year, primarily on their overall satisfaction. And I will say year over year, the amount [of providers] that are indicating that burnout or dissatisfaction is related to the EMR specifically seems to be dwindling and not the key dissatisfier anymore. That’s not to say we don’t still deal with the typical physician burnout, but it is rewarding that the EMR is not the driver.

Q: How did you bring your team through such a big change?

A: This was a really big change for us, and it can be really scary. So, the moment we signed the paperwork saying we were moving forward with athenaOne, we started to make this a really big deal with our team and our providers. We threw parties, made celebrations happen. We were big with puns in our practice. We leaned heavily on the number one and throwing that into puns and fun activities for our team.

We started off with that excitement around something new and tried to focus there instead of this being scary. We also made a very conscious effort to have our team involved in the various aspects of the build and the development phases, so that they understood what they were getting into ahead of time. And I think that was a really integral part in us being successful as we made the official go-live transition.

Having our team involved in the build process was a huge component to us being successful in the long run. They were able to see what athenaOne offered and how that maybe differed from our previous system. They were a little more understanding of why workflows needed to change. And then, ultimately, they felt involved in the entire process. And so that makes all the difference in the world — whenever you understand the whys of what you’re doing and you also get to be involved in a really big change.

Those super users for us also really helped to drive the understanding with their team members. And they were huge in the go live process of being able to answer questions for their peers and help them troubleshoot some of the challenges, even though we did have really great support from the athenaOne team at go-live as well.

Q: What stood out about the onboarding and support experience with athenahealth?

A: We transitioned in COVID, so that was a different era than a lot of organizations experienced. But I do think the cool factor to this is we learned how to make a big EMR transition almost fully remotely. We engaged a lot with the athenaOne team via Teams calls or Zoom calls over the time frames. We did a lot of training remotely and had more limited staff on site as we made that full transition happen.

The cool part was this, it felt very seamless and easy still. We always had somebody available, especially in those initial days of go-live that was on a call or a video for us to tag into any time we needed support. So a remote command center, if you will. But really the support and the encouragement and the ability to answer questions for us whenever we were really challenged was so helpful, not only in developing what the system would look like for us, but also getting us through those initial few days when you’re really working out the bugs and the kinks of a new system.

I think the athenaOne process is set up to be very strategic. During the onboarding process, we would meet consistently and we were given homework to accomplish, and we were held very accountable to making sure that happened. And I really think that was an integral part for us to be able to move forward on a timeline during the onboarding process, to really meet the goals of where we wanted to be at go live.

I have nothing but great things to say about the team that helped us make the transition or the jump. I felt like they were very transparent in what we needed to do, showed tough love when we needed it, and they were very knowledgeable to all of the aspects of the system. I just felt like they understood our practice and also understood what athenaOne would be and helped us navigate that journey pretty easily.

Q: Why has athenahealth been a strong fit for an organization like yours?

A: I think there’s a variety of reasons. There have been several challenges that it’s allowed us to tackle. Unfortunately, we needed to become a smaller business, and the efficiencies that we had gained from athenaOne allowed us to do that through attrition without having to let team members go and have them working their fingers to the bone without enough teams and without enough support to get what they need.

From a business perspective, when I think about cost savings and efficiencies gained from a staffing perspective, that’s been huge. There is a lot of flexibility with how the providers are able to do their documentation, how you can set up your encounter plans and make the system work for you. And so I think the level of flexibility we have, without that need for somebody to be an excellent coder that understands how to do all the nuances of the tech world, has been great. Ultimately, I just think the system itself is very intuitive to learn and to use, and it makes new team members coming on board a very simple onboarding process for them to come up to speed and be able to provide the care that we need to our patients.

One of the pieces that we’re most proud of currently is we’ve got 80% of our patients that are presenting for their visits with a credit card on file. Other pieces that I look at along the way, from an FTE perspective, we’ve had significant reductions in our billing department and our scheduling team, reducing those by about 50% just because our patients are self-scheduling so frequently that we’re avoiding those phone calls and not needing to dedicate support there any longer.

Q: What advice would you give to other organizations considering a similar change?

A: One of my favorite sayings is ‘Good is the enemy of great.’ But also I think you can’t let great be the enemy of getting going. It’s hard to not want to find the perfect thing and work out all of the problems before I commit to something. But I found that whenever you’re making a big change like this, what’s most helpful is to go ahead and commit. If you think that it’s good enough, commit, move forward and know that you’re going to run into some bumps. You’re going to fail a little bit. And that’s OK. You fail fabulously.

I ultimately don’t think that you should hinder your ability to get going by waiting on something to be perfect. If it’s good enough to get there, commit to it and work on those challenges along the way.