Streamlining operations with self check-in

Five minutes may not seem like a significant delay. But across 600 patients a day, on average, five extra minutes per patient at check-in can turn a well-orchestrated day into chaos. For Megan Kerrick, Director of Administrative Operations at Virginia Urology, this was a recurring issue.

"If all 600 patients need to be registered when they come in, it's going to create a clog, and then clinics are going to run behind, and providers are going to be upset," Kerrick explains. "It's just a snowball effect."

Virginia Urology serves as the largest specialty practice in central Virginia, with seven locations, 40 urologists, and a patient population that skews heavily 65 and older. The demographic of their patient panel presented a unique challenge: how do you digitally engage patients who may not be as comfortable using technology to manage their health, while managing the operational demands of a practice where every minute matters?

Leaning into an integrated solution: Enhanced Self Check-in

In 2024, at athenahealth's Thrive Summit, Kerrick attended a workshop on Enhanced Self Check-in, hoping to address this challenge.

In the workshop, she had the opportunity to ask questions and build a foundation of knowledge to create her organization’s workflow. Over winter break, while most of her colleagues were away and the business was quiet, Kerrick sat down to build out the Enhanced Self Check-in workflow for Virginia Urology.

Kerrick participated in a free, one-on-one coaching engagement with an athenahealth expert to help her quickly learn how to get her organization set up on Enhanced Self Check-in. With this coaching engagement, she says, "I felt reassured that we had built it out correctly for our practice needs, which made us much more confident in training our teams and the actual roll-out of the product."

"It's so easy how it's set up. It's probably one of the best things I think athenahealth has rolled out," she reflects at Thrive 2025, nearly a year later. "It's all in one area in athenaOne, and it walks you through step by step what needs to be done."

Kerrick set up a robust workflow through Enhanced Self Check-in, incorporating every feature available—including screeners, consent forms, family history, medical history, social history, medication reconciliation, and more. According to her, “It helps a lot with MIPS capturing data, we really use all of it.”

Now, 100% of their departments are set up on Enhanced Self Check-in, and their focus is on patient education and support to improve adoption of the tools.

A transformation in patient digital engagement

Kerrick has set an ambitious goal for Virginia Urology: 70-80% patient self check-in rates. That might seem lofty for a practice serving predominantly older adults, but the results Virginia Urology has already seen show incredible momentum.

athenahealth equips customers with the ability to monitor and measure their patient’s digital engagement over time through a unique, proprietary measurement called the Patient Digital Engagement Index (PDEI). The PDEI metric takes into account several elements of ways patients can engage digitally, including accessing their healthcare information and financial activities.

In just six months following implementation, from March to September 2025, Virginia Urology’s PDEI transformation has been remarkable.

- Digital check-in adoption surged from single digit patients before November 2024 to 56% in January 2026

- Their Patient Portal Payment rate jumped from an average of 13.2% before November 2024 to an average of 27.7% in the following year

- Patient demographic holds, or claims submitted to payers that are flagged or delayed due to issues with the patient’s demographic information, decreased 80%, from an average of 143 before November 2024 to an average of only 28 in the following year

- Key workflows have improved steadily month-over-month since November 2024, with the following total increases through January 2026:

• Insurance Card Scanning: 12% increase
• Patient Full Registration: 10% increase
• Portal Adoption: 11% increase

- Their healthcare information PDEI score skyrocketed 38.4 points, from 8.9 to 47.3, demonstrating how effectively they've engaged their patient population digitally. This represents a 431.5% improvement. 

- Their patients choose to be digitally engaged: 90.3% of patients with mobile phones have consented to text communications, 85.8% have provided email addresses, and 92.8% have consented to phone calls.

The real victory between the lines is how much quicker patients get access to care they need. Kerrick shares, "Since we're a specialty practice, and we are the largest urology group in central Virginia, we have a lot of referrals that come in. [Specialists are] able to now dedicate their time to reaching patients, to get them in, to see one of our urologists much quicker than we were before. We used to have a pretty big delay in reaching out to referred patients. And now, whatever comes in, we're reaching out to them the same day."

The practice has also seen significant improvements in payment collection and insurance verification. Patients are more willing to pay digitally, and having insurance information captured ahead of time allows staff to verify coverage and address issues before the appointment.

Streamline your operations and engage your patients digitally

To learn more about how Enhanced Self Check-in and athenaOne's digital patient engagement tools can transform your practice's efficiency and patient experience, connect with our team today.