Handling seasonality with athenaOne® for Urgent Care

Stay prepared for seasonal illness surges with athenaOne for Urgent Care

Urgent care centers are a cornerstone for same-day appointments to address patients’ acute health needs, particularly during seasonal illness surges. But given recent shifts in cold & flu season, it can be challenging for urgent care centers to keep up with the demand and shorten throughput times while meeting patient expectations. 
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has indicated the 2025-26 flu season should be “moderate” in terms of hospitalizations due to influenza,¹ but urgent care centers may be increasingly called on to handle non-emergent cases.

Staying prepared for seasonal illness surges calls for an intelligent, integrated solution that empowers urgent care clinicians to handle higher patient volumes. Enter athenaOne for Urgent Care, an AI-native, all-in-one solution designed to help optimize operational efficiency when same-day demand is at its peak.

Customizing workflows for high-volume seasons

Some of the most critical challenges during seasonal illness surges include managing immunization workflows, clinical documentation improvement (CDI), and new patient intake. athenaOne for Urgent Care can help simplify these efforts with comprehensive workflows that aid documentation and reporting measures:

• Flu vaccine management & reporting: athenaOne captures and reports flu vaccination data with ease, supporting integration with immunization registries and public health agencies. Its compliance with ONC certifications can help practices meet critical regulatory standards.
• Vaccine reconciliation capabilities: The ChartSync feature in athenaOne helps match, validate, and deduplicate records from more than 55 connected registries. As a result, patient vaccine history is accurate and readily accessible at check-in. Plus, connection to the registries helps encourage bi-directional data flow for optimal public health reporting.
• Ordering and documentation workflows: Clinicians benefit from workflows streamlined for ordering and documentation. Some of these include customizable text macros, saved templates, and order sets. These documentation accelerators can be specifically tailored for things like cold & flu season, particularly if urgent care clinicians find themselves documenting similar notes or ordering the same prescriptions from patient to patient. And the EHR learns from manual selection over time, prioritizing popular selections for easy access and helping reduce manual entry burdens during the busiest times of the year.
• Automated Insurance Selection: This AI-powered feature can accelerate the intake process for new patients during peak seasons when patient volumes surge. Automated Insurance Selection uses AI optical character recognition (OCR) to help extract key details from uploaded insurance cards and validate them against existing patient records before automatically suggesting the correct insurance to bill. This can also help prevent denials upstream and accelerate revenue cycles. athenaOne customers using the Automated Insurance Selection workflow have seen a 35% reduction in insurance-related rule hold rates² and a 10.6% reduction in patient insurance-related denials.³

Using custom workflows and harnessing AI-powered tools can result in meaningful time savings and support providers in delivering intentional, high-quality care.

Smartly anticipating trends and servicing timely patient outreach

Preparation extends beyond the clinical setting. athenahealth’s Flu Insights Dashboard and athenaOne’s patient engagement tools can help urgent care centers anticipate patient needs and mobilize outreach strategies effectively:

• athenahealth Flu Insights Dashboard: This dashboard analyzes backfilled historical patient data for more than 170,000 clinicians on the athenaOne network.⁴ It can help illuminate seasonality trends that may guide practice staffing and resource allocation for things like flex scheduling. By working to stay ahead of seasonal trends and making necessary adjustments before anticipated surges arise, urgent care centers can feel confident about meeting the moment.
• Proactive patient engagement: Practices can use athenaOne to build patient outreach campaigns. This allows urgent care centers to contact specific patient populations — such as those at higher risk for respiratory illnesses – with targeted communications at scale. This might include educational campaigns or timely reminders for patients to get their flu vaccine as a means of promoting preventive care.
• Agentic AI for automated outreach: The rise of agentic AI in healthcare is especially relevant for urgent care centers hoping to streamline patient communications. That’s why we’re continuing to innovate by building agentic AI systems into athenaOne while also offering agentic AI integrations as part of the athenahealth Marketplace. Agentic AI can notify patients of any action items or important information regarding care events, which can help close care gaps and optimize care coordination.
• Secure two-way texting: Finding ways to automate communication and relay information between patients and clinical staff can prove vital during seasonal illness surges. For example, two-way texting with AI triaging is scheduled to be added to athenaOne in 2026. While AI agents will be able to respond to certain kinds of patient inquiries, they will also route important messages to clinical staff when needed.
• AI waitlist scheduling: Another capability expected to release in 2026, the AI waitlist scheduling tool in athenaOne will instantly notify patients when appointment slots open, including same-day availability. Filling these slots can help reduce the chance of financial losses from no-shows.

These tools can help clinicians meet patients at timely moments of care, which is vital for public health during seasonal outbreaks.

A fully integrated solution like athenaOne doesn’t just prepare your urgent care center for seasonal surges — it can help reduce administrative burden and improve accuracy in documentation and billing so clinical staff and practice health can thrive.

Operational speed and quality reporting during busy seasons

The AI-native capabilities embedded within athenaOne can help deliver measurable improvements in urgent care clinics’ operational performance during peak illness seasons, supporting both throughput via documentation efficiency and end-to-end revenue cycle management tools to help support financial health.

• Leveraging AI to help boost same-day chart closure: The new Chart Assistant in athenaOne, with AI assistant Sage™, provides AI-generated patient summaries and help extract data from patient charts without manual sifting. Recently, athenahealth also announced plans for a reimagined AI-native clinical encounter that can help anticipate clinicians’ needs, surface relevant insights in the moment of care, and draft documentation, orders, and diagnoses based on the clinician-patient conversation.
• Leading throughput time: With a cloud-based, SaaS infrastructure that continuously provides the most updated patient data and AI-powered documentation tools in the clinical workflow, urgent care clinicians can feel adequately prepared to give patients the care they need with athenaOne for Urgent Care. Our infrastructure is also one reason why athenaOne excels in throughput time for urgent care centers. In fact, top-performing urgent care operators on the athenahealth network achieve a patient throughput time of less than 30 minutes.⁵
• Clean claims the first time: With the help of a proprietary billing rules engine and AI-enabled claim scrubbing, urgent care centers on athenaOne have seen a clean claim submission rate of 97.5%.⁶ We’re doing everything we can to improve on that mark by building end-to-end automation into athenaOne revenue cycle management capabilities. That includes moving towards AI-enabled coding to help reduce administrative burden and improve accuracy. AI-native RCM capabilities in athenaOne can help urgent care centers get paid what they’re owed during seasonal illness surges.
• AI-powered payment recovery: Building off other AI RCM innovations, AI agents in athenaOne will soon help identify denial write-offs for claims unlikely to collect while also providing insights for coding-related denials. These AI-powered tools can help streamline revenue cycle management during the busiest times so practices can work to collect the maximum amount without arduous labor from clinical and billing staff.
• Higher Patient Pay Yield (PPY): athenahealth customers on athenaOne collect more patient payments, with a median patient pay yield of 78%.⁷ That metric signifies high appointment utilization and financial performance even amidst seasonal volatility.

A fully integrated solution like athenaOne doesn’t just prepare your urgent care center for seasonal surges — it can help reduce administrative burden and improve accuracy in documentation and billing so clinical staff and practice health can thrive.

Succeeding amid seasonal illness surges

athenaOne for Urgent Care combines integrated workflow customizations with AI-enhanced tools to help urgent care centers stay prepared ahead of and during seasonal illness surges. From flu vaccine management and compliance to AI-powered patient outreach and revenue cycle optimization, athenaOne supports every facet of busy season management.

If you’re seeking an EHR system that stands out with smart, scalable solutions for impact seasons, athenaOne is engineered to meet that challenge head-on.