New athenaOne features arrive in Spring 2026 release

What’s new in athenaOne — and why you didn’t have to do a thing

Every few months, practices across the athenaOne® network wake up to a system that works better than it did the day before. No manual upgrades . No projects to implement new technology. No deciding between versions. Just improvements — live across more than 170,000 clinicians, nationwide — because staying current is built into how athenaOne works.

The Spring 2026 release brings meaningful advances across AI, interoperability, practice and revenue cycle management, and patient engagement. Here’s what changed, and what it means for practices.

AI that reduces the work before it reaches you

The most significant athenaOne updates this cycle are concentrated in AI — applied where the administrative burden is highest.

The Time of Service payment workflow now includes an AI-determined copay amount, helping improve the accuracy of patients’ financial responsibilities at check-in and check-out and reducing the need to chase balances after the visit. Our customer-favorite Ambient Notes — available with both iScribe AI and Suki AI — now supports customizable note style preferences, giving physicians control over verbosity, structure, and formatting, so documentation fits the way they work. Multilingual support has been added to iScribe AI, with the ability to summarize conversations in English across 10 languages.

For practices receiving plain text documents, AI now automatically extracts patient information and classifies ADT (Admission, Discharge, and Transfer) event types — reducing manual matching work and improving accuracy on the front end of care coordination. And in the Clinical Inbox, AI now automatically redirects advertisement and spam faxes out of staff queues, taking another manual and repetitive process off the plates of staff so they can stay focused on patient care.

Intelligent interoperability — care everywhere your patients are

Interoperability has always been a promise easier to make than to keep. The gap isn’t usually in the data — it’s in what happens to it after it arrives. Raw data feeds, duplicate records, and unstructured documents create noise that slows clinicians down rather than supporting them.

athenaOne is built to do something different. Across our network, AI sorts, parses, reads, organizes, and surfaces exchanged information so that what reaches the clinician is relevant, reconciled, and ready to act on. That’s what intelligent interoperability looks like at scale — and it’s what a network of 170,000+ clinicians make possible.

This release advances that capability in concrete ways. Our built-in ChartSync tool now surfaces and reconciles external patient problems from CommonWell, Carequality, and Direct Secure Messaging directly in the chart. Patient Record Sharing has been expanded to support enhanced TEFCA (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) data sharing, helping practices stay current with federal interoperability requirements without requiring them to manage the regulatory lift. Confidential encounter data can now be flagged to restrict external sharing — including in the athenaOne Mobile app — giving practices and patients more control over sensitive information from where they are.

When a patient sees a specialist, gets lab work done across town, or receives care through a telehealth platform, athenaOne works to ensure their primary care physician has a  consolidated picture — not a data dump.

Revenue cycle, tightened at every stage

Enhanced alerts surface upcoming appointments with expired or soon-to-expire authorizations before they become a collections problem. The Time of Service modernization is a workflow redesign aimed at supporting better collections at the point of care, anchored by the new AI-determined copay. The Transaction History page now includes primary payer adjustments, transfers, and denials — giving billing teams a clearer view of where claims stand without having to chase it down.

Taken together, these updates address the revenue cycle at three distinct moments: before the visit, at the visit, and after the claim’s submitted.

Patient engagement that meets patients where they are

Patients can now access documents and practice resources directly in the athenaPatient app, including prescription renewals and medication information. Same-day appointment confirmations now go out immediately across email, text, and push notifications. Practices can add attachments to patient cases within athenaOne, closing a gap that previously limited what staff could share in response to patient inquiries. And self-scheduling has been enhanced to allow patients to book into appointment types templated specifically for their recommended care — making it easier for patients to get to the right visit without extra steps on either side of the desk.

Built from what you told us

A significant share of this cycle’s updates were driven directly by customer input. The revamped Exercise Flowsheet, improved patient portal document organization, same-day appointment confirmation messaging, and attachment support in patient cases all trace back to requests from athenahealth user groups and our CoLabs program — where customers work alongside our product teams to shape what gets built next. This ongoing feedback loop transforms how physicians engage with product development.  “Listening to physicians and using data insights helps move from quick win to new normal.” He adds, “Doctors raise their hands to try new alphas and betas. They participate because they see real results.” Chris Voigt, of Privia Health.

This is the feedback loop that makes a network-based EHR different from a system you install and manage yourself. When one practice identifies a gap, the solution benefits every practice on the network. athenahealth’s model is to be a partner with care organizations, not merely a tech vendor.

Updates don’t arrive alone

Every release is supported by more than the features themselves. athenaOne customers receive advance communications before updates go live, along with training resources, in-product guidance, and release documentation designed to help teams understand what changed and how to use it.

Beyond the release cycle, every athenaOne customer works with a Customer Success Manager — a consistent point of contact who helps practices understand which new capabilities are most relevant to their workflows, supports adoption of new features, and ensures optimizations translate into outcomes, not just options. For practices with specialized missions, this partnership is particularly valuable. “We’re so unique, and we need someone who understands our mission. [Our CSM] is always so supportive in helping us think long-term, think big picture." explains Kimberly Ragsdale, of Breastfeeding Success Company.

For practices that have managed health IT upgrades on their own before, this is a meaningfully different experience.

Your athenaOne is always current. Never behind.

Practices evaluating EHR, practice & revenue cycle management, and patient engagement systems often ask about upgrade cycles, version management, and what it costs to stay current. With athenaOne, that question doesn’t apply. Every practice in the network receives every update, automatically. There’s no migration project when regulations change.

The Spring 2026 release is one of several shipping this year — each shaped in part by feedback from the practices using athenaOne today. If you’re still managing an EHR that requires you to manage its future, it’s worth asking what that’s costing you.