Learn how our Customer Success Managers partner with behavioral health providers to share insights, best practices, and create a roadmap for practice success

Navigating insurance complexities at her behavioral health startup was a headache for Michelle Gilreath, a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP-BC). Whether it was manually verifying patients’ insurance information to dealing with the downstream revenue cycle challenges that came with having the incorrect insurance on file, these time-consuming tasks felt like the number one barrier to her and Mindwell mental health clinic’s success.

But as soon as she started with athenaOne® for Behavioral Health, Gilreath received hands-on support from her Customer Success Manager (CSM) to not only help automate the insurance verification process, but also to refine and streamline her entire revenue cycle, from patient intake to managing billing and denials. Working with her CSM “helped build her confidence as a provider and business owner,” she says, and gave her a source of guidance, knowledge, and encouragement.

Behavioral health providers historically have had little support for their specialty. But working with athenahealth’s CSMs, providers like Gilreath get a healthcare IT partner that understands the challenges and demands of behavioral health, with access to insights from a vast network of experts.

Our CSMs understand your challenges and pain points

Behavioral health care teams face a common dilemma: ensuring seamless, holistic patient care, while being forced to use HIT systems that aren’t built for behavioral health workflows. Our CSMs have witnessed these issues firsthand while working alongside behavioral health providers, and know exactly how to target these core pain points:

Low reimbursement rates – Behavioral health practices may struggle with managing their revenue cycle and lower reimbursement rates compared to medical services. This can cause significant financial strain, especially for smaller practices and startups.

Inefficient clinical workflows - Providers at behavioral health practices often face a disconnect between desired and required documentation along with a lack of specialty-specific templates.

No lines of communication - Lack of adequate support or advocacy with their previous HIT system has left many behavioral health providers in the dark when they most needed help.

Providers partner very closely with CSMs when they join athenahealth so they can enable better care for their patients. There’s such a level of respect; they’re really devoted to helping people. That’s the main goal.

- Patrick Smith, Customer Success Manager

And they’re experienced with the behavioral health specialty

athenahealth CSMs aren’t new to the daily needs of a behavioral health practice. Our support team members have been working one-on-one with behavioral health specialists for years, seeing firsthand how the athenaOne platform positively impacts the lives of behavioral health providers and their patients.

Customer Success Managers leverage their experience and learnings from many different behavioral health customers and bring those learnings into their partnerships with new customers so critical industry and specialty insights get passed on and disseminated. Similarly, customer success team members help keep customers informed about any new system and feature updates so they can make sure they’re getting the most value possible from athenaOne for Behavioral Health.

How athenahealth Customer Success Managers help your practice succeed

1) Quick and easy onboarding experience – We provide a behavioral health-specific onboarding team that will work with your practice to gather critical information about your business, ensuring an easy and seamless go-live experience. Practices get unlimited, one-on-one training support with a coach as well as behavioral health-focused online learning tools right from the start, helping them quickly get up to speed on all the benefits of athenaOne.

2) Personalized solutions and support – With athenaOne for Behavioral Health, your practice gets support from day one. athenahealth's dedicated CSMs help provide personalized guidance to help tackle a practice’s top-of-mind challenges and ensure long term success. CSMs can help behavioral health providers find the right solutions, features, and services to fit your practice’s needs.

3) Vast network of insights and resources – When a provider signs on with athenaOne, they immediately get access to a dedicated resource page on the Success Community, become part of a behavioral health-focused User Group with almost 1,200 users, and become a member of the athenaOne network that contains over 21,000 behavioral health providers.¹ Our CSMs collaborate closely with customers to proactively surface these learnings, insights, and best practices, and act as a liaison so providers can discover how to navigate and utilize these invaluable industry resources.

The athenaOne network is a resource for learning, knowledge-sharing, and networking. If a customer has a question about something, I’ll say, ‘let’s go ask the Success Community’ and we figure it out together. It’s not something that people coming to athenahealth have ever had access to before.

- Jenifer Grendell, Customer Success Senior Associate

4) Practice performance measurement - athenahealth CSMs are experts in revenue cycle management, having helped hundreds of athenahealth customers to level-up their practice performance. They can help customers build efficiency and automation into their practice’s daily RCM tasks — like insurance verification, patient intake, and claims creation — to establish a sustainable revenue cycle process tailored for each customer. Additionally, our CSMs can help providers understand how their practice's performance stacks up to peers on the athenaOne network, allowing them to make informed, data-driven decisions to meet their financial and clinical goals.

See our CSMs in action: a testimonial from Mindwell mental health clinic

Since partnering with a dedicated Customer Success Manager to tackle her clinical efficiency and revenue cycle challenges, behavioral health specialist Michelle Gilreath has seen an 85% same-day encounter close rate² — reducing the amount of work she needs to complete outside of the clinic. 

Working with a CSM who specialized in RCM allowed Gilreath to achieve some impressive practice performance results as well, including:

• 10x increase in patient volume
• 3.0 days avg cDAR
• 4.8 days average time to bill
• 0% average missing slips rate
• 2.7% back-end denial rate

Daily collaboration and hands-on athenaOne training sessions with her CSM empowered Gilreath to grow her startup practice. She learned how to take advantage of athenaOne’s powerful tools and features, like One Stage Focused Visit, PDMP integration and drug checks, and auto-population into the clinical chart for information like medications and allergies.

Gilreath also worked closely with her CSM to learn the core steps of healthcare revenue cycle management and best practices, a common pain point for many behavioral health providers. With the help of her CSM, Gilreath was able to confidently navigate new medical billing and practice performance tasks.

Choosing athenahealth means getting a dedicated partner to help your behavioral health practice thrive

As Michelle Gilreath learned first-hand, having a dedicated athenahealth Customer Success Manager is a unique experience. Our CSMs can not only help behavioral health practices learn to succeed using athenaOne’s specialty-specific tools and features, but can also help providers glean invaluable insights from the vast athenaOne network.

Working with a behavioral health experienced partner, one who knows the ins and outs of your particular practice, can help your practice achieve long-term sustainability and growth.

Read more about Gilreath’s success with athenaOne for Behavioral Health.