Achieving agility, interoperability, and affordability at scale

Stephen Behnke, M.D., is the chief executive officer of Lexington Clinic, a multispecialty physician group in Kentucky. We talked with him about how athenahealth supports growth and scalability, helps Lexington Clinic compete through agility and interoperability, and creates new opportunities to improve the provider and patient experience with artificial intelligence, or AI.

Q: What makes Lexington Clinic distinctive and what are your organization’s growth goals?

A: As a physician enterprise that is independent, [I think] our independence is probably the biggest thing that sets us apart because we can focus on our providers more closely. And that allows us to take better care of patients.

Our growth goals at the Lexington Clinic are to continue to be one of the best physician enterprises in the world. What does that mean? That means we have to actually take better care of our providers. And that will allow our providers to take better care of patients.

Over the last several years, we’ve actually doubled in size, and we’re probably the fastest-growing multispecialty group in the Midwest. When I came to the clinic, we were about 154 providers. And I believe we’re at about 320 today.

Q: Why has athenaOne® been the right fit for Lexington Clinic as you scale?

A: For a physician group like ours, we’re often capital constrained. So having a robust EHR (electronic health record) that is scalable and grows with the organization is really important — and one [we] can afford. One that offers value for what we’re paying and keeps up with all the latest innovations and tools needed to be a cutting-edge organization.

athenahealth has been a great partner in that [athenaOne] helps us scale — because we have a standardized platform that we can take to our partners. A lot of physicians are coming to us from groups that don’t have stable EHR platforms and have been struggling with IT (information technology) costs, upkeep, and all the dynamics that go into running a physician practice today.

Being able to bring to a practice a very stable platform that is scaled — and scalable — is a very powerful tool for us. [athenaOne] is very efficient, and I would argue it’s one of our more powerful value drivers when a group is looking at partnering with the clinic.

Q: In a market crowded with large EHR competitors, what has helped athenaOne stand out?

A: I think athenaOne’s biggest strength is its agility.

There’s really no best model in our market, but that doesn’t really matter because [other models don't] suit what we want an EHR to be — agile, scalable, cloud-based, and flexible enough for a physician practice to be world class.

It’s not that other EHRs are bad necessarily. We just would argue that athenaOne’s agility gives us leverage and strength that is outclassing what other tools can do. And I think especially at the cost structure that we're in, these other EHRs are extremely expensive for a group like us. We don’t have the margins that a hospital system has.  

For us, it’s about getting the best return on investment (ROI) for what we’re doing with the EHR compared with the health systems.

Q: How is athenaOne helping Lexington Clinic strengthen interoperability and data exchange?

A: For the last several years, we’ve been working to get data from all of the different EHRs in our market into our version of athenaOne and then into the patient’s record. That way, we don’t have to necessarily go to the other connection points at hospitals.

In an ideal state, we’d have true, pure interoperability. I’m not sure society is totally ready for that yet, although the governments are pushing us that way. But for us, it’s been pretty effective to begin to pull that data and see the data natively in athenaOne.

I think that part of our future journey is [determining] how to get data and be more agnostic to where the patient is; have the patient’s data always moving with them wherever they are.

We’re able to share the data from athenaOne with [the] tools we need to operationalize efficiently in a way that a lot of other EHR vendors don’t want to share. They don’t want to play ball when it comes to interoperability. But that’s never been my experience with the athenahealth team. When we have a request to [move] data in or out, it’s always been amazing how efficient we’ve been in getting that data through the [athenaOne] system.

Q: How has athenahealth helped your providers become more efficient at the point of care?

A: In my mind — a physician or a provider — they’re not monolithic. They actually fall along the standard or normal distribution curve as far as their engagement with the tool. Some providers and physicians are super users, whereas others are lagging behind on their utilization.

Part of our journey over the last couple of years has been how do we help our providers have better knowledge and understanding of the tool that we’re using every day to see our patients at the point-of-care. What’s interesting to me is how athenahealth has partnered with us to engage our team and help us develop training systems and pathways to get our knowledge base up higher.

It’s about narrowing the curve and shifting the entire group to a higher performance. athenahealth has been integral in helping us do that.

Our point-of-care utilization is very high. But that doesn’t mean that we’re completely out of the woods as far as optimization. We still have work to do to get our providers even further optimized. But it’s nice having a partner that’s helping us take that journey together.

Q: What role do AI and new technology play in the future of healthcare at Lexington Clinic?

A: We’ve been leveraging AI scribes to help our providers become even more efficient in the tool, and that’s been welcomed by athenahealth from Day One.

So many physicians today are right on the edge of burnout. But at the same time, patients also feel like healthcare is not a very efficient experience for them. Why not use technology to make healthcare a better process for patients, while making it an easier process for physicians?

I think that’s actually a very, very exciting opportunity, and it can scale in ways that we’ve never even thought about. Over the next three to five years, AI [could] radically transform how we do medicine.

Q: How does athenaOne help support patient engagement and the overall patient experience?

A: The athenaOne Patient Portal (part of athenaOne's integrated suite) has allowed our physicians to maintain good relationships with patients. It allows patients to communicate all the time, ask questions, create feedback, and get lab results.

For us, the athenaOne Patient Portal also allows patients to stay engaged with their care, schedule appointments, and pay bills, which to me is an important part of a physician practice today.

[During visits], many of our providers [use] small laptops or desktops in the room because athenaOne is so integrated into how our providers see patients. They’re able to share real-time information with the patient because it's right there at their fingertips. It's very powerful.

Q: What would you tell physician groups evaluating athenaOne today?

A: First and foremost, agility and scalability are incredibly important. There are many EHR solutions on the market that are [built] on antiquated frameworks and would be difficult to maintain for those companies over time, whereas athenaOne has positioned itself to be on the more cutting-edge side of the platform.

Second, its commitment to interoperability and data openness is also very, very powerful.

Number three is cost, especially in the context of return on investment. [That's] very strong in the athenaOne camp and less so for larger EHR vendors.

Having a partner that has a large footprint and very scalable technology that’s already taking care of millions and millions of patient encounters, who's also going to keep investing in the latest technology so the group doesn’t have to? I think it's a great partner.