EHR transition takeaways from an FQHC

Five ways to make your EHR implementation smoother

Before you set out to transition your health center to a new Healthcare IT solution, it helps to know what to expect from someone who’s gone through it.

In 2020, North Country Family Health Center (NoCo), a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in northern New York, needed to fix problems that slowed down care delivery, quality improvement, and reporting. They made a pivotal decision to switch EHR systems – and have several best practices and recommendations for anyone contemplating a similar digital transformation.

Located near the St. Lawrence River and Adirondack Mountains, the health center serves more than 16,000 patients annually across community and school-based sites, offering medical, dental, behavioral health, and WIC services.

Switching to athenaOne® transformed how their team works across clinical, compliance, and operational areas.

Jessica Jones, Director of Quality and Compliance at North Country, helped lead the clinic’s transition to a new electronic health record, practice management, and patient engagement solution. Here are her top five takeaways for any health center considering a system change, including lessons learned and what she thinks more health organizations should know before making a technology move.

1. Recognize when your EHR is limiting — not enabling — your goals

NoCo didn’t change EHR platforms in response to a system failure. Instead, they recognized that their existing EHR, though functional on the surface, was forcing them into workarounds that slowed down quality reporting and made population health efforts unnecessarily dependent on manual tasks.

According to Jones, a series of analyses effectively demonstrated the potential for growth NoCo would have on athenaOne, and they determined that it was a digital overhaul. "We were experiencing a lot of significant down time and high cost of operating that environment, and we really saw the improved efficiencies across the board [athenaOne offered].”

For many CHCs, the barrier to action isn’t dysfunction — it’s inertia. But identifying when a system has outlived its usefulness is critical, especially when your team needs to deliver more integrated, outcomes-based care.

2. Lead the transition with someone who knows your organization inside and out

While athenaOne brought the software and implementation expertise, NoCo’s success also hinged on strong internal leadership. Jones was deeply involved from the beginning, overseeing the project and translating clinical, compliance, and reporting needs into system requirements and workflows that were critical for implementation and optimization.

NoCo and athenahealth partnered through onboarding by regularly touching base in specialized sub-committees, so staff members could learn the elements of athenaOne that pertained to them without feeling overwhelmed with the full breadth of information. Jones said, “our team really appreciated those subcommittees because it meant that everyone kind of went to where their focus and their kind of skill area was. Everyone didn’t have to go to everything, because that would get really intensive.”

CHCs preparing for an EHR transition should invest in empowering internal champions — staff members who not only understand technology but also have the trust of clinical and administrative teams. And they should choose a technology partner who listens and configures the build to your specific organization’s needs.

3. Treat implementation as the beginning of a longer partnership

North Country went live with athenaOne in October 2020, at the height of pandemic-related uncertainty. It wasn’t an ideal time to be shifting platforms, but having a partnership built on responsiveness and alignment made the transition manageable.

Jones has a clear perspective on the division of responsibilities between NoCo and athenahealth in onboarding their teams: “athena’s goal is to train you on how to build and configure the system, how the product actually works; it’s your job to translate how that functionality is going to work within your workflows."

For health centers used to navigating vendors with minimal support, this shift toward closer collaboration can be a defining part of the experience. Implementation doesn’t end at go-live — it should evolve into ongoing, strategic support.

Before, growth meant more complexity and more workarounds. Now it means scaling workflows that already work.

Jessica Jones, Director of Quality and Compliance, North Country Family Health Center

4. Build for growth, not just stabilization

After going live with athenaOne, North Country continued to grow and expand service lines to serve their communities. They added an on-site pharmacy and a new practice location, expanded school-based services, and kept up with changing regulatory and reporting demands. For Jones, the biggest difference was that their integrated EHR, practice management, and patient engagement system, athenaOne, could actually support those changes without added complexity.

Jones's advice to other organizations? When evaluating a HIT system, consider its capacity to support you not just for the transition, but during growth. Can it support multi-site workflows, new service lines, and reporting across funding streams without dragging down your team? If it cannot, or if it can do so only with extra workarounds and bolt-ons, it won’t serve you down the road.

The results they’ve seen have aligned with their expectations, based on their initial analysis. Jones says that since coming to athenaOne, “We certainly have reduced out of office working time, which is a a huge driver of burnout.”

5. Choose a partner who aligns with your mission and outcomes

Technology matters, but it has to be backed by experts who understand the mission of community-based care. For North Country, the support they received from athenahealth wasn’t transactional, between a vendor to a purchaser. athenahealth’s model is to serve as a partner who is aligned with the center’s long-term priorities. Having that strategic focus and embedded software and services model helped NoCo stay focused on delivering better care, not just checking technical boxes.

A key element of the partnership with athenahealth is NoCo’s dedicated, CHC-specific Customer Success Manager, who Jones considers an “extension of [her] team.” Their CSM regularly surfaces important and actionable insights to help their business thrive, keeping a finger on the pulse of analytics that are important for NoCo’s success. Jones said that because of that relationship, “We're fixing problems instead of spending time trying to find the data just to identify what those are.”

That partnership approach continues to pay off years later with a dedicated Customer Success Manager working hand in hand with Jessica and her team, invested in their mutual success.

For other FQHCs and community health centers, the takeaway is clear: choosing an EHR is about more than selecting a vendor. It’s about identifying a long-term partner who can adapt alongside your organization, respond to real challenges, and stay focused on what drives community impact.

Leadership, alignment, and readiness drive results when choosing an HIT vendor

North Country Family Health Center’s EHR transition wasn’t a flashy tech upgrade after a glitzy pitch. It was a deliberate decision led by internal clarity, strengthened by external partnership, and fueled by a commitment to do better work across every department.

Their story offers a practical roadmap for other CHCs and large community practices, one grounded not in buzzwords but in the reality of running care teams, managing compliance, and serving complex patient populations. With the right leadership and the right partner, the move to a new system can provide much more than efficiency. It can unlock capacity, confidence, and room to grow.

Get in touch to learn how athenaOne can help you realize your health center’s full potential and read more to learn about athenaOne® for CHCs.