Efficient providers are happy providers

In pediatrics, each visit can feel like a cacophony of information. Not only are you hearing about the patient’s symptoms, but you might also navigate siblings clamoring for attention, concerned parents with questions, and a library of past tests, specialist notes, and urgent care visits that need to be taken together to understand the full picture of a child’s health. Amid this complexity, the burden of documenting all that relevant information can weigh heavily on providers, pulling focus from the patient in front of them.

Dr. Mali of Mali & Mali Pediatrics has navigated this challenge for decades. “Documenting while you're in the exam room with a patient can be difficult, particularly in pediatrics,” he confirms. “There’s a lot of information coming at you. You want to have the full context of every patient that walks in beyond what brought them in.”

That’s one reason why Dr. Mali is committed to his 14-year partnership with athenahealth: because his physicians can leverage tools and workflows designed to reduce clicks and keystrokes in key clinical workflows. Providers at Mali & Mali Pediatrics heavily use tools such as Encounter Prep and athenaOne® Voice Solutions to expedite their administrative work—and the impact is in the numbers.

Preparing in quiet to focus amidst chaos

For Dr. Mali, athenaOne’s clinical accelerators, specially Encounter Prep and Voice Solutions, shifted the timing and flow of documentation, from a parallel sub-task while trying to focus on the patient to an efficient and thoughtful task done in advance.

Now, Dr. Mali says, “My notes are done before I’ve even walked in the room, because I’ve done encounter prep and I’ve used it with Voice Solutions. So, I have very few edits to make.”

The power of athenaOne Encounter Prep is in its flexibility. This feature lets providers dive into labs, previous visits, specialist notes, and urgent care details well before an appointment. “It could be the night before, which is when I do it, or the morning of, and I can process the information without a screaming sibling in the room or what have you,” Dr. Mali says. “I just basically take a step back and say, how has this patient, this child, or this family interfaced with the health care system?”

This preparation transforms the visit, both for Dr. Mali and the patient. “By the time you walk into the visit, you appear very prepared,” he says. “And parents will often forget that they even had these interfaces with the health care system, and they'll say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, we have the X-ray on my child's ankle.’”

With this system in place, Dr. Mali feels equipped to show up as a proactive, prepared, and thoughtful clinician. He also has room to consider the patient holistically and develop a relationship in the room and has very little admin work hanging over his head when he leaves.

Efficiency as a foundation for patient care

Beyond lightening cognitive load and creating space for clinician-patient connection, this flexibility also creates new opportunities for efficiency. Empowering providers to document when and where they choose means that documentation can happen more intentionally and efficiently than if it’s being squeezed in. The provider team at Mali & Mali sees incredible clinical efficiency, compared to the athenaOne network at large, and Dr. Mali credits much of this success to the heavy adoption of these accelerators.

This is how Mali & Mali Pediatrics compares to the rest of the athenaOne network, in terms of how heavily they leveraged clinical accelerators in July 2025:

As the above numbers demonstrate, clinicians at Mali & Mali Pediatrics take advantage of athenaOne’s clinical accelerators at far higher rates than the rest of the network. As a result, they also see higher efficiency.

- In July 2025, Mali & Mali Pediatrics’ average documentation time was 9.1 minutes per encounter on average, almost half the athenaOne network average of 17.8 minutes.

- Half of their providers saw a same-day encounter close rate of over 90%, exceeding the network average of 86.8% - in fact, four of these providers close encounters same-day over 98% of the time.

- Half of their providers complete 88% or more of encounter documentation during business hours, compared to the average of 77.3% across the athenaOne network.  These same providers complete 10% or less of their encounter documentation after-hours, compared to the network average of 22.67%.

- Encounters are amended only .63% of the time across the organization, on average. *

Future-proofing your practice with an innovative partner

Mali & Mali Pediatrics leverages athenaOne’s clinical accelerators as a foundation for growing and improving their practice to serve more patients, without sacrificing quality of care or work-life balance. For Dr. Mali, these tools aren’t just efficiency hacks—they’re enablers of the kind of patient-centered care all providers should aspire to deliver.

Get in touch to learn more about how athenaOne can help your organization streamline workflows for providers to improve clinical efficiency, reduce burden that can lead to burnout, and improve patient care.