How software innovation helps improve health equity

5 ways athenaOne supports diverse patient communities

Community health centers serve diverse populations. But with a large patient populace comes more distinct patient needs that can create challenges for Community Health Centers (CHCs) and the technology they use.

In many organizations, these issues surface as patterns more than isolated issues: higher no-show rates in certain populations, repeated intake corrections, or delays in follow-up care that trace back to earlier workflow gaps.

At the same time, staff must sometimes manage fragmented systems that don’t always reflect those realities. The result can be incomplete documentation, missed visits, delays in care, and disruptions to reimbursement cycles.

Patients often navigate overlapping barriers at the same time. Language differences, transportation challenges, limited digital access, and varying levels of financial constraint can all have downstream impacts on the care journey. This is especially true when workflows are not designed to adapt in real time. Even if intent is clear, lack of scalability may prevent a more robust implementation of health equity strategies across organizations.

athenaOne® is designed to help close that gap by connecting capabilities across the patient journey. Access, documentation, engagement, coordination, and financial workflows work together to help support consistent care delivery. Here are five ways new athenaOne capabilities can help CHCs provide equitable healthcare.

1. Capture clinical encounters in your patients’ language

Language barriers have a far greater impact than face-to-face communication. They also influence how accurately a patient’s story is captured, interpreted, and carried forward across care teams.

In many settings, this responsibility falls unevenly on bilingual staff or interpreters, which can introduce variability depending on who is available at the time of the visit.

This variability can lead to downstream effects such as incomplete histories, inconsistent documentation across visits, or gaps in follow-up instructions. All those factors can snowball into a less representative dataset that may require additional clarification later, which can complicate matters during patient follow-ups or sharing information with payers.

A language barrier shouldn’t prevent patients from getting the care they need, nor should it cascade into extra work for clinicians. That’s why Ambient Notes in athenaOne features multilingual documentation capabilities. The ambient scribe can capture conversations across 80+ languages and help generate structured summaries for the care team while preserving original transcripts for cross-comparison and verifying accuracy.

With multilingual support now available across both Suki and iScribe AI, organizations also have greater flexibility in how ambient documentation fits into clinician workflows, including more tailored user preferences that align with individual documentation styles.

This can help CHCs:

• Reduce documentation burden for bilingual staff
• Preserve clinical nuance in diverse populations
• Improve continuity across care teams

More inclusive documentation can better reflect the patient’s experience. It’s a reflection of why existing customers shared the need for a multilingual tool, which helped prompt innovation.

Indeed, practices using Ambient Notes have seen positive measurable outcomes. In fact, 3 out of 5 close more encounters within one day of the visit, with an average improvement of 28%.¹ Increased efficiencies may explain why more than 2 million notes have been created using Ambient Notes.²

2. Enable integrated telehealth to accommodate mobility and distance barriers

Access challenges typically result in missed appointments, though the direct cause for these challenges often varies. Transportation, mobility limitations, geographic distance, and competing responsibilities all influence whether patients can engage with care.

For organizations serving a diverse patient base, like CHCs, missed visits can sometimes cluster around specific patient groups or appointment types. This can lead to uneven clinician schedules and make it harder to plan staffing and follow-up care.

The above illustrates the continued importance of offering telehealth services to balance clinician availability with access challenges. And it’s part of why athenaOne got an expansion to integrated telehealth capabilities as part of the Fall 25.11 release. New integrations in the telehealth solution are meant to provide flexibility for clinicians and help improve patient communication, satisfaction, and access.

Clinicians are notified when patients are in the virtual “waiting room” and can confer with colleagues in other locations before beginning the call. Additionally, they can choose when to admit or remove patients from a call, pause calls as needed, or send customized messages to patients if they are running late or wish to iterate visit preparation instructions. Clinicians can also accommodate multiple patients and conduct group sessions as needed.  Finally, patients can access calls directly from the athenaPatient® app instead of opening an external web browser.

These capabilities can help support:

• Better visibility into patient flow during virtual visits
• More seamless mobile experiences for patients
• Scalable care models, including group behavioral health sessions

By using an integrated software that helps provide a more scalable, seamless experience for both staff and patients, practices can help make telehealth a cornerstone of providing expanded access to care. Streamlining telehealth offerings can also help boost patient satisfaction. Nearly 90% of patients left a 4- or 5-star review after completing an appointment using athenaTelehealth.³

^{Language differences, transportation challenges, limited digital access, and varying levels of financial constraint can all have downstream impacts on the care journey.}

3. Meet patients where they are with flexible engagement tools

Some seemingly routine practice operations can manifest challenges for patients that are otherwise invisible to care teams. This can happen as soon as during the intake process.

Having to fill out paper forms, provide in-office signatures, or submit insurance information manually can create friction for patients balancing work, childcare, or limited access to technology. That friction may lead to incomplete intake data, longer check-in times, or last-minute cancellations, all of which can place additional strain on front-office staff and disrupt clinic flow. athenaOne has gotten updates to several capabilities that enable practices to jumpstart the intake process ahead of time.

Expansion of the Forms on Demand capability now allows practices to send digital forms and screeners to patients at any time, not just during intake or examination. Similarly, practices can also launch requests for digital patient signatures (via email or SMS) for privacy and consent forms.

Aggregating the right insurance details can provoke its own challenges for practices and diverse patient populations alike. But practices on athenaOne can also help speed up that process by sending on-demand requests for patients or their caretakers to upload images of their insurance card.

Earlier initiation of intake processes can help enable:

• Remote completion of forms and consent
• Faster, more efficient check-in experiences
• Improved data accuracy before the visit

Another workflow enhancement includes the ability to attach supporting documentation directly to patient cases. This hotly requested feature can help staff manage follow-ups, escalations, and patient-specific issues efficiently.

Leveraging these tools for patient outreach can help prompt engagement ahead of encounters while also improving operational efficiency for staff.

4. Support for integrated behavioral health and dental workflows

Behavioral health, primary care, and dental services often operate in separate workflows, which can make it harder to coordinate treatment and address comorbidities. And even when services exist within the same organization—as is often the case with CHCs—differences in documentation structures, scheduling systems, and care protocols can make coordination a real challenge in attempting to improve health equity.

Duplicated intake, delayed referrals, or gaps in shared patient context caused by fragmentation further require staff to manually shepherd information across systems. athenaOne helps bridge these gaps by working to build out documentation and data sharing for more holistic, integrated access across specialties using the same software.

Behavioral health providers can now find DSM-5 diagnosis terms listed in their own section of the Enhanced Diagnosis search tool instead of having to manually enter these codes in the Assessment & Plan (A&P) note. This inclusion can help enhance more holistic and representative documentation for CHCs under a single, unified platform.

The ChartSync tool in athenaOne shows brief AI-enabled summaries alongside all hospital encounter documents received via Patient Record Sharing (PRS) to help clinicians determine high-value items they may need or choose to share across care teams. At the same time, enhanced confidential data controls allow organizations to restrict sensitive information from PRS and HIE sources to help strengthen privacy, support compliance requirements, and ensure appropriate access across teams.

Additionally, multispecialty practices can benefit from the interoperability capabilities of an athenaOne network powered by an Advanced Intelligence Layer and expanded TEFCA participation. That can enable cleaner data exchange across care systems and settings, supporting population health management to help remove disparities and provide equitable healthcare.

All of the above can help bolster:

• Standardized, specialty-aligned documentation across care teams
• Fast and actionable clinical context sharing at the point of care
• Seamless coordination across multispecialty and external care networks

athenaOne can create a unified view to help CHCs support the totality of patient care, rather than isolated interventions.

5. Strengthen financial performance with connected revenue cycle workflows

Missing insurance information, unclear authorization requirements, and delayed payments can all disrupt access to care and create administrative strain. Financial friction often appears late in the patient journey, but it is shaped by upstream processes such as eligibility verification, authorization timing, and documentation alignment.

athenaOne supports operational efficiencies upstream through connected revenue cycle workflows that employ timely automation.

Once practices send on-demand requests for insurance card upload, AI-powered Automated Insurance Selection works to help select the correct patient insurance package and important details for claim processing. Meanwhile, AI-enabled Interface Insurance Mapping helps map third-party insurance information containing patient demographics and or charges into athenahealth's library of insurance packages. It also works to help resolve inbound interface insurance package mapping errors, so customers do not have to resolve them manually.

With Express Authorizations, an AI-supported determination engine assesses whether prior authorization is needed for imaging, procedures, or referrals and makes recommendations accordingly, helping reduce unnecessary work and accelerate approvals through an exception-based approach. Staff can see authorization requirements and referral documentation for inbound referrals within Quickview, minimizing guesswork and payer outreach. A centralized authorization tracker allows teams to manage and prioritize tasks in one place to help improve visibility, reduce errors, and keep care on track.

These capabilities can help organizations:

• Reduce denials and delays
• Improve financial transparency for patients
• Strengthen overall financial sustainability

At the front desk, AI-determined copay amounts can reduce friction by helping staff collect more accurate payments upfront. Deploying automation in this workflow helps minimize guesswork, avoid under- or over-collection, and can improve both patient transparency and practice cash flow.

Need further proof? From an operational perspective, athenaOne customers save 4,700+ staff hours annually using the AI-enabled Interface Insurance Mapping workflow, compared to a manual workflow.⁴ 

Customers using the AI-powered Automated Insurance Selection workflow saw a 15.6% reduction in patient insurance-related claim denials, compared to those using manual insurance selection methods.⁵ Zooming out further, athenaOne customers had a median monthly claims denial rate of 5.7% in 2024, meeting the industry standard of 5-10%.⁶

By resolving insurance and authorization issues earlier, these workflows help reduce delays, avoid unexpected costs, and improve access to care for diverse patient populations.

Turning equitable care into operational reality

Delivering equitable care goes beyond expanding access. It’s finding operational unlocks that can help reduce friction at each point in the patient journey.

When workflows are connected, teams can find a practice that features more predictable schedules, fewer intake corrections, and reduced rework across clinical and administrative teams. That can give clinicians, CHCs, and other organizations time back to focus on the more meaningful aspects of patient care. For example, proactive patient outreach and educational campaigns to engage patients and help erode communal health disparities.

athenaOne can help organizations turn healthcare equity goals into operational reality by connecting workflows to reduce friction and deliver more consistent, accessible care.