Top 7 Reasons to Choose athenaOne® for Urgent Care

How athenaOne can help urgent care centers thrive

The healthcare ecosystem in the United States has experienced tectonic shifts in the last 25 years with the passing of the Affordable Care Act and growing adoption of AI in healthcare. But patients themselves are also driving change – notably in urgent care.

From 2019-2022, urgent care centers saw an increase of over 71 million visits per year – as a result, the growth rate for urgent care centers as of 2023 stood at seven percent.¹ Continuous shifts in patient behavior and emerging trends in urgent care centers including more ancillary services necessitates having an integrated health platform that can help practices scale up.

athenaOne is an award-winning, industry-leading healthcare software solution that integrates electronic health records, practice management, medical billing, revenue cycle optimization, patient engagement, and robust reporting all within a single system. athenaOne is a cloud-based SaaS platform with an Advanced Intelligence Layer at its foundation and native AI that benefits from being an integrated network, continuously learning and adapting from updates across that network.

This system already helps hundreds of urgent care operators across the United States deliver coordinated patient care, improved health outcomes, and streamlined workflows every day. Here's more about the unique capabilities of athenaOne for Urgent Care, and 7 data-backed reasons why you should consider this industry-leading practice management and EHR software system for your practice.

1. Unmatched clean claim rate

Recent increases in patient volumes financially benefit urgent care practices, but they only reap the rewards if the revenue cycle process runs smoothly. That’s why it’s essential to have a practice management software with end-to-end AI RCM capabilities that can help improve accuracy and reduce administrative workloads. Urgent care centers using  athenaOne  lean on our proprietary billing rules engine and can see a 97.5% clean claim submission rate² on the first pass and 1.6% front end rejection rate  that leads the industry.³ With the high volume of claims submissions your urgent care center files every week, this adds up to hundreds of hours of saved time and optimized RCM processes.

2. Higher Patient Pay Yield (PPY)

Customers using athenaOne experience a 78% median Patient Pay Yield.⁴ Moreover, practices using athenahealth’s online payment solutions have a 65% higher Patient Pay Yield than practices that do not use athenahealth’s online payment solutions,⁵ helping to boost your revenue without the extra effort. With high-deductible plans and a greater percentage of uninsured patients, urgent care centers benefit from these features that can help them collect more of what they’re owed in a way that is also convenient for patients.

3. Efficient patient workflow

Speaking of ways to help increase patient engagement and satisfaction, giving them transparency into scheduling and wait times while also helping them smoothly move through every stage of care can be pivotal for urgent care centers. Top-performing urgent care operators on athenahealth’s network achieve a patient throughput time of less than 30 minutes.⁶ The power of one integrated platform helps practices give patients the care they need and get them out the door to keep the queue moving efficiently. athenaOne for Urgent Care can help your practice prioritize and optimize scheduling for both operators and patients.

4. Scalable platform

One of the differentiators of a cloud-based, AI-native platform like athenaOne is how it continuously learns from data updates throughout the network without the need for added integrations. The platform will integrate and structure patient data from disparate sources and harness the power of predictive analytics to help improve care coordination while also learning from and including relevant payer updates and trends in claim denials for RCM optimization. Having all those updates deployed across the network within the framework of a single, intelligent system can help reduce the level of manual work and enable practice administrators to upskill in other areas, which may contribute to increased scalability.

As more urgent care clinics open, especially in underserved areas of the country, and expand to offer more service lines, urgent care centers don’t have to choose between a small, single-specialty EHR or a large multi-system EHR. athenaOne for Urgent Care gives the best of both worlds, with tailored workflows and templates to serve your patients’ and clinics’ needs.

5. Dedicated Urgent Care support

Our urgent care-specific customer success teams are laser-focused on your outcomes. Plus, you’ll have access to our urgent care user group and Success Community, where you can find answers to questions from other athenaOne clients using the software every day. Urgent care clinic managers can rely on their dedicated athenaOne Customer Success Manager (CSM), who understand the specific needs of urgent care organizations and can help clinics monitor performance, and stay on top of business insights and industry trends.

6. AI toolset tailored to practice needs  

In addition to native AI in athenaOne, the solution boasts a robust slate of AI tools across various workflows, including: 

• Ambient AI scribes, like Ambient Notes, that allow for hands-free documentation of clinical encounters. Clinicians have the option to choose between different models to better suit their documentation style. And soon, ambient listening models will also help provide context-aware recommendations for clinically inferred diagnoses while mapping billing and diagnosis codes from the encounter to the appropriate place in the patient chart – all of which are subject to clinician review.
• Leveraging generative AI and clinical AI aides to help clinicians navigate charts and pull in relevant patient data. Clinicians can ask the AI assistant, named Sage, to extract data and add their own follow-up notes to patient charts while conversing with the AI assistant, which can help with preparedness ahead of patient encounters.
• Utilizing AI optical character recognition (OCR) to assist with automated insurance capture and, soon, deploying agentic AI to help traverse payer portals or follow up with payers on claim status.
• Providing automated advice for coding-related denials to help increase payment recovery or highlight denials that are unlikely to be recovered. Practices utilizing these tools have seen a 26% payment recovery for coding-related denials.⁷
• Automated EOB digitization to help reduce manual data entry and efficiently close the revenue cycle process.

In addition to some of these tools, athenaOne also has AI capabilities that can help clinicians navigate the clinical inbox with targeted searches or automate fax labeling from incoming faxes. Future innovations will also empower AI agents to help automate the extraction of lab analytes from incoming faxes and extract data from imaging results.

Want to optimize reporting? athenaOne will soon offer a Data Explorer workflow that allows practices to filter and save queries while working with a query assistant to help create custom reporting using natural language processing (NLP). No matter the need, athenaOne has smart automation to help minimize redundancies and reduce administrative burden.

As more urgent care clinics open, especially in underserved areas of the country, and expand to offer more service lines, urgent care centers don’t have to choose between a small, single-specialty EHR or a large multi-system EHR.

7. Simple partnership model

Our simple partnership model for athenaOne for Urgent Care has no upfront costs and covers all future upgrades and standard interfaces. With our included three-times-per-year product releases, you’ll always be on the latest version of the software, without disruption or additional costs. You get all these updates, and your dedicated Customer Success Manager to help you understand and optimize them, just by being an athenaOne for Urgent Care customer.

Choose athenaOne for Urgent Care

These 7 data-backed examples are some of the reasons why athenaOne for Urgent Care is an industry-leading solution for urgent care operators of all sizes. If you’re ready to learn more about how athenaOne for Urgent Care can help your urgent care centers achieve better clean claims submissions, faster and higher payments, expanded interoperability and reporting along with greater clinical efficiency, reach out to our dedicated urgent care team today.