How athenaOne® supports long-term patient care

Lynn Joffe, M.D., is the physician and owner of DTC Family Health, a family practice organization in Colorado. We talked with her about how athenaOne® supports long-term patient relationships, improves financial and operational performance, and creates new possibilities with AI.

Q: What makes DTC Family Health distinct as a practice?

A: DTC Family Health is a seven-provider practice, actually all women and all moms. We provide a full-service family practice. We are also quite involved in value-based care and are part of a large ACO (Accountable Care Organization). We value patient interaction, and we jokingly say that we're a small-town practice in the middle of a large city because we really value our relationships with our patients.

We've actually been around for about 30 years, and I've been there the entire time. It’s really about creating relationships with patients. So often in our area, a lot of the practices have been bought up by hospital systems or larger groups. Although they're very focused on value-based care and meeting measures, I think a lot of times you lose that relationship with patients.

Many of our providers have been here for over 20 years. We've delivered babies, watched them grow up, and now we're seeing their children.

One of the things that's happened in American medicine is that we have really fragmented healthcare. You have a left toe specialist and a right knee specialist, and we sort of forget that people are whole people altogether. What brought me to primary care, and what has kept me in primary care, is exactly that. It’s really getting to know somebody in a longitudinal way over time, getting to know them and their families.

Now, as I've aged, my population has aged, and I watch them age, working with their families to navigate a really complex healthcare system and the issues with aging.

Q: How does athenaOne help you support those long-term patient relationships?

A: I've been with athenaOne since 2011, and so we now have quite a large longitudinal historical background on the vast majority of our patients. Just watching their story through the system, through athenaOne, is really helpful. When they say, “Hey, remember what happened to me back in 2013?” I can quickly search for that and find what they're referencing.

I also love the ability to prep the chart in athenaOne, because when I go into a room, I'm ready to talk with that patient. I've sort of gotten a quick grasp and view of who they are, reminding me of their story, so that I'm not sitting on the computer the whole time, and I'm able to navigate their story.

Q: Why was athenaOne the right fit for your practice operationally and financially?

A: athenaOne had, and still has, a cloud-based system where I'm not having to do the updates, I'm not having to manage the server. As a small family practice, we're sort of a mom-and-pop shop where there are times I've cleaned the toilets, answered the phones at the front desk, and done everything. Having to also be IT and manage all that was beyond what we could do.

It's amazing that our claims go out clean the vast majority of the time, that we're not chasing our tails with that, and that we can easily adjust and adapt in athenaOne. I can update codes as they change and stay at the forefront of that.

We're able to, on the fly, fix those and update them in our system. We have a really low claim failure rate. That is huge for a small practice.

Q: How has athenaOne improved patient engagement and helped you keep patients healthier?

A: The portal and the ability to communicate with patients quickly and effectively — instead of using snail mail or faxing things — and having a way for them to access us easily was huge for our patients and for us. We were early adopters of all of that and continue to have the vast majority of patients sign up with the portal.

We send out quarterly newsletters through the communicator. We try to use as much as possible. It's such a robust system that we probably only use 10% to 15% of it already, but [we use] anything that we can to engage patients.

We also do chronic care management and advanced primary care management. Being able to reach out to patients — and now having the capacity to text them and stay in touch — helps us keep them out of the hospital. We have a low ER (emergency room) rate and a low hospitalization rate because I think we're able to reach out to our patients and get to them quickly before they start that deep slide into the ER and the hospital.

It saves everyone money, and it saves that patient a lot of heartache and trauma.

Q: How are you using athenaOne data and reporting to drive care quality and business decisions?

A: One of the big things is that we give a lot of vaccines, right? Tracking those, making sure where people are at, following those quality measures, making sure that people's blood pressures are where they're supposed to be, and that they've had the A1C (blood test), breast exam, mammogram, colonoscopy, and all of that kind of stuff.

So, we run those reports regularly, and athenaOne supports us with quality measure dashboards where it can sort of say, “Hey, this measure hasn't been met,” or “Do you know if this measure has been met?” Being able to close gaps fairly easily using all of those resources and reporting [is valuable].

Q: What excites you most about the AI opportunity with athenaOne?

A: I'm pretty forward-thinking, so I'm actually quite excited about using this, and I'm willing to give it a try. I think using vetted programs [is important]. That's why we're so excited that athenahealth is moving in that direction, because you guys are taking on that burden of vetting these products for us. By the time they get to us, I feel fairly secure that they are safe products that are going to benefit our patients and us.

What we need is one solution that meets [our] needs. So, to have ambient AI in there, and to also have diagnosis suggestions and clinical decision support all in one place — not in a sidebar or an overlay, but intimately integrated within athenaOne — it is a primary care clinician's greatest dream. We're not having to navigate third-party vendors, other contracts, or other expenses. It's all-inclusive.

Q: What has ambient AI changed in the exam room for you personally?

A: [It's] life-changing. I prep all my charts, so I sort of know what I'm going into, and I frequently don't touch my computer anymore. It used to be that I was rapidly adding orders and trying to remember little snippets of what patients said.

I think ambient AI is life-changing for a primary care clinician. We walk into a room and instead of having to sit there and capture all the little snippets — and it's not unusual for my patients to have five, 10, or 15 problems they want to discuss in that visit — trying to navigate all of that while typing is overwhelming and exhausting for a clinician.

Now I can sit there and enjoy my patient. The AI is going on in the background. It's capturing all that. I still am obligated to go through it and review it and make sure that there's no confabulation or hallucinations. But it has freed me to really enjoy talking to my patients again and spending my time with them.

Q: Beyond the technology itself, what stands out about working with athenahealth?

A: I'm a big believer in collaboration and sharing concepts. What I felt like was that we needed to be talking to each other one-on-one, clinician to clinician, and talking about workarounds and finding solutions to the pain points we were experiencing.

I've actually used the community to reach out to multiple different people and have this dialogue about how this is going to look, how we're going to manage it, and how to come up with a team approach where we're sharing ideas in a very new area.

What I see all the time is someone saying, “Hey, we're having a real problem with this issue,” and someone else saying, “Oh, here's a quick solution to that.” It's life-changing for practices that weren't necessarily able to get that from the customer support center because they're getting it from people who are in the trenches with them.

We also have a lot of product managers who join us on the User Group. That happens quite frequently where we're able to say, “Hey, this is a great idea, but in practice, maybe this is a better one.” So, yes, we use the User Group to help create ideas.

Our CSM (customer success manager) has also been really available to us. I'm able to reach her via text or email. If we're hitting a barrier with the CSC (client support center) or other places, I can quickly reach out to her and find a solution.

I think athenahealth is a really wonderful company to work with. They play nicely with others. They interact with outside groups. Their view and approach are inclusive.

I would encourage other practices to use them from several levels. From a financial level and from a workflow level, I think it's a really good decision. And I know athenaOne has been the best EHR for our practice.