How PrimeCare Community Health increased same-day documentation by 10%

PrimeCare Community Health is a community health center (CHC) serving Chicago’s diverse and underserved communities. Every day, the PrimeCare Community Health behavioral health department confronts a critical challenge: understanding and then meeting the growing demand for mental health services. Bharathi Jayaram, Chief Behavioral Health Officer, and Ricardo Aguinaga, Behavioral Health Consultant Clinical Manager, understand that keeping physicians happy, productive, and working at the top of their licenses is essential to this mission.

athenaOne® serves as the foundation for PrimeCare Community Health’s clinical documentation, operations, patient engagement, and more. “The EHR is the thing you document in, but it's so much more than that” Jayaram says. Both Jayaram and Aguinaga leverage tools and data in athenaOne to surface critical insights to clinicians, guide decision-making, and improve efficiency.

Transforming workflows, empowering clinicians

In 2024, athenahealth launched athenaOne® for Behavioral Health, renewing their commitment to supporting tailored, specialty-specific workflows for behavioral health organizations on athenaOne. Last November, the new Behavioral Health encounter layout was released, streamlining clinical documentation in athenaOne for behavioral health providers by following the data/assessment/plan format and integrating treatment plans directly into the encounter.

This new workflow was designed to reduce clicks and surface key information while allowing for customization. The impact this change made to the encounter documentation workflow was immediate, Jayaram says: “It makes the documentation process intuitive. And it’s reducing the number of clicks, that’s the big piece.”

“Text macros, encounter templates, and patient case snooze are all simple features that can dramatically improve a clinician’s quality of life,” Aguinaga adds. As part of PrimeCare Community Health’s culture of continuous learning, he connects regularly with providers to review efficiency data and encourage use of these tools.

Beyond improving providers’ quality of life and the organization’s efficiency, workflows such as encounter layouts and accelerators have helped PrimeCare Community Health create consistency around documentation across their departments. As a large CHC with several departments, not to mention the consideration of provider preference, standardizing documentation can be a challenge. “[These tools] have made documentation uniform across providers,” Aguinaga says.

A measurable impact

PrimeCare Community Health’s dedication to adopting the new, tailored encounter layout bore measurable results. By June 2025, 93% of providers in PrimeCare Community Health’s behavioral health department had adopted the new behavioral health one-staged focused visit workflow. PrimeCare Community Health saw a spike in providers adopting the new layout between May and June; that same month, same-day encounter close rates rose 10 to 15% on average.*

What does all of this mean? As providers adopted the new encounter layout, they completed documentation significantly quicker and closed encounters on the same day the visit occurred more often. This not only creates more space for providers to focus on patient care while they’re in the office, but it also lets them get home on time, without work hanging over their heads.

Get in touch to learn more about athenaOne for Behavioral Health

PrimeCare Community Health’s experience offers an illustrative example of how empowering clinicians with the right technology and education can create meaningful changes to how they get work done.

Get in touch to learn more about how athenaOne for Behavioral Health can help your clinicians thrive.