Customer feedback drives healthcare product innovation

How Voice of the Customer drives clinical efficiency and more

Listening to and meeting our customers’ pressing needs is our number one driver at athenahealth. Questions like, “What would make your workday easier?” and “What keeps you up at night?” fuel our strategy. To capture customer feedback and turn their requests into reality, we created our award-winning Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. The result? Real solutions that directly address the daily challenges healthcare teams face.

Serving over 170,000 providers across diverse care settings — from solo practices to large health systems — gives us an unparalleled view into where operational friction consistently emerges across the healthcare landscape.¹ Since 2016, our VoC team has transformed this scale-driven insight into actionable improvements.

This continuous listening process captures insights from direct surveys, user product ideas, escalations, and customer-led user groups, then synthesizes this feedback through natural language processing and dedicated subject matter experts to identify patterns that span the entire spectrum of ambulatory care. The program even earned a Silver Stevie® Award for Best Customer Feedback Strategy in 2021, a testament to our company value, “Obsess over customers.”²

Our Fall 2025 product release embodies this customer-driven approach by including targeted enhancements that tackle the friction points healthcare teams consistently report. From streamlining authorization workflows to enabling multilingual documentation and intelligent data management, these improvements are already earning rave reviews from customers.³ 

Eliminating authorization guesswork with proactive, intelligent workflows

Physicians and practice staff report spending an average of 13 hours per week on prior authorization requests, often initiating work only to find out a prior authorization wasn’t required.⁴ This feedback shaped our Express Authorizations offering.

The problem is familiar: Currently, staff must spend valuable time determining whether imaging, procedures, surgeries, or referrals require approval, often relying on outdated payer information or time-consuming phone calls. Missed authorizations can delay care and cause claim denials that impact patient outcomes and practice revenue.

Express Authorizations transforms this reactive process into an intelligent, exception-based workflow.* The Authorization Determination Engine provides real-time insights supported by expert research, payer integrations, and AI to instantly determine whether authorization is needed when ordering services. This means staff only focus on cases that truly require attention, avoiding unnecessary authorization work while speeding up legitimate approvals.

The feature delivers three solutions for commonly reported pain points from our customers:

1. Centralized task management: The new Authorization Tracker consolidates all required authorization information in one location, allowing staff to update and prioritize by urgency with custom filters and views — saving time and reducing errors.
2. Upfront clarity for specialists: Inbound referral requirements now display directly at appointment scheduling, ensuring staff are aware of next steps for timely patient care.
3. Proactive insights: Staff can rely on the Authorization Determination Engine rather than constant payer updates to avoid unnecessary authorization work.

When customers tell us prior authorizations are eating up their day, we build smarter automation. When behavioral health providers say they need better tools, we create group telehealth and standardized coding. When practices struggle with document overload, we deploy AI that works.

Breaking down barriers to better patient care

Beyond streamlining administrative tasks, athenahealth is addressing some of the most pressing challenges in patient care delivery itself. Even when the paperwork flows smoothly, practices tell us they still struggle with fundamental care delivery obstacles: patients waiting months for behavioral health appointments, mental health providers lacking proper documentation tools, and language barriers that complicate patient interactions.

These updates target the real bottlenecks that prevent practices from delivering their best care:

• Group telehealth visits tackle the growing crisis in behavioral health access. With demand far outpacing provider availability, patients often wait weeks or months for mental health appointments. Group sessions allow practices to serve multiple patients simultaneously, maximizing specialist time while providing the peer support that makes group therapy so effective. Providers maintain full control over the experience — managing participant visibility, privacy settings, and session flow — while patients get faster access to care without practices needing additional staff.
• Standardized mental health coding responds to behavioral health providers’ requests for professional documentation tools. Built-in DSM-5 coding ensures mental health diagnoses are recorded using the standard clinical language insurance companies expect and other providers recognize. This reduces claim denials, improves care coordination between specialists, and gives behavioral health teams the documentation standards they deserve.
• Multilingual Ambient Documentation addresses the reality of serving increasingly diverse patient populations. When language barriers slow down visits, providers often struggle to capture complete notes while managing interpretation needs. athenahealth now offers automatic voice documentation in Spanish and other languages through integrated AI solutions including Suki AI and iScribeHealth. Providers can speak naturally during visits with non-English speaking patients while advanced AI processes multilingual conversations in real-time, capturing structured notes accurately in English within athenaOne. This allows providers to focus entirely on patient care rather than documentation logistics, improving both patient engagement and same-day encounter close rates.
• On-demand insurance card image requests tackle the frustrating reality of outdated or missing insurance information that delays care and creates billing headaches. Instead of staff spending time calling patients for updated cards or discovering coverage issues at checkout, they can email or text the patient a request to upload images of their current insurance card. This eliminates the back-and-forth that often postpones appointments or creates claim denials, ensuring accurate coverage information is available before the visit even begins.

Turning data chaos into clinical clarity

Between patient record summaries, referral documents, and clinical notes, data overload is a reality for many providers. Our Fall 2025 release addressed customer feedback with new AI-powered features designed to reduce that burden. That’s where AI-powered documentation tools are making a real difference, tackling two of the biggest time drains in medical record management:

• ChartSync Document Summaries using AI helps providers better manage patient record summaries, enabling more efficient care transitions. Instead of providers wading through pages of medical history, AI now creates concise, clinically relevant summaries with 90% accuracy. Beta testing reveals these summaries surface 2x more critical patient allergies than manual chart reviews, improving both efficiency and patient safety.⁵
• AI document labeling addresses the tedious reality of medical record organization. With 89% accuracy, the system automatically categorizes and labels incoming documents, reducing manual sorting by two clicks per document.⁶ While that might sound small, it adds up to hours saved weekly for busy practices — time that can be redirected toward actual patient care instead of digital filing.

Both features connect directly to workflow efficiency and reduced manual effort, transforming how practices handle the constant stream of medical information that modern healthcare demands.

Building what practices need

These updates to athenaOne represent athenahealth’s commitment to the feedback loop that drives real innovation. When customers tell us prior authorizations are eating up their day, we build smarter automation. When behavioral health providers say they need better tools, we create group telehealth and standardized coding. When practices struggle with document overload, we deploy AI that works.

This cycle of listening, building, and delivering continues because healthcare challenges keep evolving. The administrative burdens, care delivery obstacles, and data management headaches you face today inform the solutions we’re building for tomorrow. Every time a customer says “I wish this system could...” becomes the blueprint for what comes next.

Read more product updates to discover how athenahealth continues turning customer feedback into the tools that transform your practice.