Future-proofing ambulatory care with AI

In the past several years, trends in healthcare have painted a clear picture of overburdened, understaffed ambulatory care organizations trying to meet a rise in patient demands and in administrative burden. Now, through thoughtful, strategic implementation of AI-powered workflows, organizations can overcome previously insurmountable burdens.

At HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Chad Dodd, athenahealth’s Vice President of Product Management, and Sap Sinha, COO of Allied Digestive Health (ADH), discussed how AI-native athenaOne® has helped ADH reduce operational friction and empower staff to work at the top of their licenses.

Allied Digestive Health: Staying ahead of the change curve

ADH is a fully integrated, innovation-forward gastro-intestinal platform with over 350+ gastroenterologists, pathologists, anesthesiologists, CRNAs, NPs, and PAs serving New Jersey and New York. After joining the organization five years ago, Sinha helped guide ADH through a period of rapid growth amid significant industry disruption.

“We are coming out of COVID, so severe, severe staff shortages,” Sinha said. “You go anywhere in this country right now, and New York and New Jersey are no different, that we just don’t have enough doctors to serve our patients.”

Sinha believes that technology has the power to enhance productivity and satisfaction for their staff and providers and enable them to deliver quality care to patients.

By embracing AI and implementing it in strategic ways across their organization, ADH has stayed ahead of industry challenges and driven incredible improvements across operational efficiency, patient care, and financial outcomes. Here’s how:

Revenue Cycle Management

ADH began by focusing on back-end processes before introducing change at the point of care.  

“We started backwards front,” Sinha said. “What does that mean? Before I touched the condition, I started with the back-end processes.”

That approach included early adoption of AI-assisted coding as well as automated insurance selection.  

The financial impact has been meaningful. “This is a real number, is that our denials fell by 34%,” Sinha said to emphasize this point.

He tied that result directly to organizational reinvestment: “What we could do is we could reinvest that cash into the practice to improve.”

Clinical Workflows

On the clinical side, AI-powered workflows can help reduce administrative burden and cognitive load. Tools like Chart Assistant with Sage can help clinicians navigate patient charts more efficiently, support encounter closure, and reduce burnout.

Clinical decision support can also help identify gaps in care and missed patient recalls to improve coordination.

That shift has supported both quality and patient experience. As Sinha described it: “Our quality has improved. We are 100% MIPS. Our ADR rates are higher. Our patient satisfaction is on NPS score is 89, which means 96% of our patients recommend our doctors, because the paradigm has changed.”

Patient Experience

This improvement in patient satisfaction reflects the impact of ADH using AI to reduce friction in the patient journey. Across their practices, AI scheduling agents and appointment accelerators optimize appointment availability and enhance patient communication without adding burden to front-desk teams.  

“The quality of the experience has changed,” Sinha said, “which our patients are finally appreciating and talking about.”  

Implementing AI with ethics, sustainability, and change management support in mind  

As athenaOne continues innovating and introducing workflows that leverage AI to alleviate clinician and staff burden and improve the patient experience, it’s top of mind to do so in a way that keeps ethical considerations at the forefront.

Here are some of the ways that athenahealth product teams prioritize accuracy, security, and patient care through development of AI features:

• Focus on targeted clinical use cases: While there’s a broad spectrum of clinical AI use cases, we’re focused on the administrative, workflow support, and decision support workflows.
• Comprehensive early testing: We have a rigorous approach to testing, leveraging hundreds of clinicians across our platform and including customer feedback as early as pre-alpha to validate use cases.  
• Continuous monitoring: We are working to implement agents to monitor AI features to quickly identify model drift, data inaccuracies, and hallucinations.

Commitment to future-proofing your organization

As we continue to develop new AI-native functionality, we’re committed to partnering with clinicians and healthcare organization leaders to ensure we’re addressing your challenges in a way that supports your goals and needs.

Learn more about athenaOne’s AI-native approach and features and get in touch to talk about how athenaOne can support your organization in tackling the most pressing challenges you’re facing.