One-doctor practice transforms RCM using automation

Challenges of a single provider medical office

Barrington Internal Medicine primarily serves Medicare patients at their main office as well as nursing homes and hospices in the Arlington Heights, Illinois area. With Ruksana Papa, M.D. as its sole clinician, the practice has heavily relied on athenahealth since 2017 to keep its small but mighty team running smoothly.

“The doctor really just wants to practice medicine,” says Rizvana O’Brien, Barrington’s practice manager, noting that running the business is secondary. Knowing this, O’Brien realized she needed help moving administrative work off Dr. Papa’s plate. That goal of reducing administrative burden led the practice to partner with athenahealth.

Finding the right solution

Finding the right all-in-one solution that would alleviate administrative burden, help improve revenue cycle management, and relieve overwhelmed staff wasn’t an easy process. In fact, O’Brien says they initially selected a different EHR, but quickly found that managing prescriptions and patient insurance and tracking certain payments would prove difficult with this vendor.

“We had just signed with [another vendor],” O’Brien says. “It would have been a $17,000 financial loss if we changed to athena, but it was worth the risk to get athena. I knew it was a good product, and I just wouldn’t let go; to me it is the iPhone of EMRs.”

In 2017, O’Brien made the switch. Barrington Internal Medicine officially became an athenahealth partner and has since seen a dramatic shift in their revenue cycle operations. According to O’Brien, they were able to achieve that success by using existing features and workflows built directly into athenaOne®, from scheduling to prescription creation to insurance verification. As she explains, “We could not schedule properly with [the other vendor]. It was difficult to understand. athena felt like a breath of fresh air, a reprieve from the reality of our earlier choice.”

O’Brien also mentioned how she can easily check daily deposits thanks to the convenient bank feed athenahealth provides to customers.

Automatic Claim Creation helps get claims out faster

One ongoing administrative burden for the solo practitioner had been handling claim creation on her own. As O’Brien explains, Dr. Papa sees all the patients herself and often gets bogged down with documenting charges, creating claims, and sending those claims out the door.

“She sees the patients on her own,” O’Brien says. “She answers calls 24/7. She goes to hospice all day Thursday. She does the work. And then if she has to do the billing on top of that, that's just not fair. And I didn't have a solution until athenahealth came along.”

That solution was the Automatic Claim Creation feature that was released in 2024. It automatically creates claims in the background once the required billing criteria are met:

• The appointment is checked out
• The encounter is signed off and closed
• The Billing tab is reviewed and completed

This feature eliminates the need to go through the full charge entry workflow. Best of all, each practice can customize the feature to run only on certain scenarios and configure it by department, specialty, provider, provider group, appointment type, and now by payer as of the Spring 2026 Release. It’s best suited for practices, departments, or encounters where no additional coding or billing work is done once the provider’s review is complete.

Since enabling Automatic Claim Creation, the practice has seen its charge entry lag go from about 60 days to roughly 14 days.

“The auto claim creation was a great idea,” Dr. Papa told O’Brien. “I’m so glad you pushed the enrollment and got it done. It does speed up chart closure. The automation will probably pick up better codes and not miss any billing that I may not pick up on.”

Empowering practices with athenahealth smart technology

For small practices feeling the weight of managing both medicine and the business side, Barrington Internal Medicine’s experience shows how smart technology can help providers breathe easier and focus on what matters most: patient care.

As O’Brien says, “At the end of the day, what [athenahealth is] doing is helping patients, because doctors are not having to do administrative work. Other people can help by doing this work, which means the doctor’s time is available to see other patients. This is just brilliant, it’s so mathematical but brilliant. Like, ‘Okay, you were spending 10 minutes with patients? There you go, there’s another 10 minutes – 20 minutes now.’ And then the doctors are calmer, which is nice for everyone.”

“From the second we walk in, to the second we walk out, you are helping us,” O’Brien says. “There's no other way to phrase it… Our doctor could not practice medicine without your software. It's as simple as that.”

Learn how your providers can get time back

If you’re interested in learning how athenaOne can support your organization in wicking administrative work away and improving your revenue cycle management, get in touch to learn more. If you’re already an athenaOne customer and you’re interested in learning more about Automatic Claim Creation, you can find more details on the Success Community and in O-help.