How one practice stays independent with athenaOne

Finding the right EMR for small practice success

Katherine Gregory is the physician owner of San Francisco Gynecology, a women’s health organization in California. Read on to learn how athenaOne® simplifies practice management, improves patient experience, and helps preserve patient relationships through responsive support and more efficient workflows.

Q: What led you to choose athenaOne for your practice?

A: Having so many tools under one roof and with one company was the primary driver, especially the billing part. Previous to athenaOne, I had to take pieces and cobble them together, and that was really difficult to do. A biller used a different system. My EMR was a different system. I used a patient portal that was a different system. And none of these necessarily integrated, and it was difficult to provide oversight in the billing area.

When I was looking for another product, in 2018, athenaOne provided all of those a Patient Portal, practice management system, EMR, all of the billing in one company. And for me, that was so much easier to manage than to try to cobble it all together. I have much better insight and control over all the processes that are involved in patient care.

Q: How has athenaOne changed your day-to-day operations?

A: My day-to-day experience is much calmer.  In private practice and independent practice, you have to understand every level of service and everybody's job. And athenaOne allows me to do that.

Because it was so easy to learn, it empowers me as a practice owner to not feel so vulnerable that if somebody is not there and this job has to be done, I can quickly show somebody how to do it.

We're much more nimble and flexible and can cross-train so much better. And I, as a practice owner, feel more secure about that.

Q: What impact has athenaOne had on patient flow and the patient experience?

A: The impact that I have seen on patient flow, scheduling, and documentation time has been tremendous. There's so much more ease with which patients can make their own appointments, like making a restaurant reservation. There are many types of routine appointments that patients can make themselves, either through the Patient Portal or through our website.

The flow through the office, once they get to the office, they've already by then hopefully done their check-in and provided us with their insurance cards. So that makes it a really easy process.

They can communicate with our office so much easier because the Patient Portal is so simple, and 99% of our patients are on the Patient Portal. So, in practically every aspect of that patient experience, there are tools within athenaOne that have helped us smooth out the flow and the process.

The athenaOne platform helps me provide concierge care but still take insurance. The rapid response that we give to patients will help the quality, because our patients will alert us if there are fewer barriers to communication, they will alert us early when there's a problem, before that problem becomes so big that they have to go to the E.R.

I believe we have been able to save patients' E.R. visits, and we get them in quickly that day, if we know that they have an urgent problem.

Q: How has athenahealth helped your practice stay financially healthy and independent?

A: The ways in which athenahealth has helped me stay financially independent with the revenue cycle tools is that I have immediate oversight by virtue of being able to look at where every claim in the process is, running reports, understanding how many claims are paid each month without having to somehow fix them.

athenaOne kind of forces us, the technology forces us to do things correctly up front before the claim ever goes out to the insurer or the clearinghouse. There are also rules in place which then alert me to perhaps some coding irregularities that will be a problem for the claim being paid.

The coding service that I recently started to subscribe to has been a tremendous help in terms of time savings and being able to find elements in the visit and the documentation that I didn't know about that could add revenue and add more codes to the visit and add revenue to the practice.

So, it's so many resources that support and help lift us in ways that we would never know about [without athenahealth].

Q: How has usage of athenaOne’s Ambient Notes impacted your organization?

A: I initially was skeptical. Because I thought that it's a new technology that sounds really great, but I'm going to be spending all this time editing; when in fact, it is genius.

It has transformed my experience with patients so that I can look them in the face and just have a conversation. The summaries that are developed are so much better than I could come up with if I were left typing and using little cryptic abbreviations that only I understand and nobody else does. There's so much more that the Ambient Notes capture in detail. So, it's been a total game changer.

With regard to the Ambient Notes, it brings me tremendous efficiency, because I can walk into a room and have a conversation with a patient, I can describe my physical findings and be secure that those will be captured in the note.

I have a much more detailed, robust note that I can quickly sign off. And the patients have shared that they have a better experience, having me look at them when I talk to them.

Q: Has the combination of athenaOne's Ambient Notes and athenahealth’s Medical Coding services freed up time for your staff?

A: The combination makes sense because the documentation is better. and that supports the coding. The efficiencies that it brings are tremendous because whereas I was doing the coding and submitting the claims before, now I'm not doing that.

My staff and I are much more able to look at the big picture and be more sophisticated in spending time and how we schedule our patients.

How do we reach out to patients and be more proactive when they are late for their appointments? How do we decrease no shows and addressing other problems that still were there, but we had no time to focus on.

There's so many ways in which we can provide more services to our patients and better support for them to get the care that they need, as well as make sure that our schedule remains full, but in a way that we still are running on time and it's a smooth experience for everybody throughout the day.

We also have more time to talk about other subjects that have to do with our patient care, education, continuing education, and look for more resources that our patients will benefit from.

Q: How do you think about ROI for these added services?

A: Even though there are costs to these extra services, there's tremendous value.
I get my time back when it comes to the coding, and I believe it will be a great return on investment because the cost is going to be much less than the revenue generated. Ambient Notes, similarly, it's the value that it brings. It's hard to put a price tag on such a better patient experience. Everything that we do is to preserve that experience, that relationship with a patient.

The goal was always, what do I do to preserve the 15 minutes I have with a patient that, where I can either delegate, eliminate, or automate other tasks so that it doesn't intrude on that visit. I don't think anybody comes into health care saying, “God, I just love the time I spend typing up a note.”

The experience and the relationship that we're building with patients, the discussions we have, about their health care concerns, that's what we try to preserve.

Q: What results are you most proud of?

A: The results that make me most proud are the feedback that we get from our patients. They're so grateful, primarily in instances where they've had a problem and we've been able to respond to them quickly or to help them solve that problem quickly.

There's not really much delay in how our processes work that day because we have few barriers to communication. I'm most proud of the ability that we have to also just be present with our patients, that we are a fairly stable office.
So, when patients come, there's familiar faces that they have.

By providing that stability and the familiarity, we get to know them better, they get to know us better. And it's a much better relationship.