Dr. Tony Euser, physician owner of Advanced Urgent Care, switched from athenaOne® to an urgent care-specific EHR back in 2018. During the 18 months his practice used this other solution, they lost millions of dollars in revenue cycle inefficiencies, he says.

Coming back to athenaOne, Dr. Euser said, “felt like coming home.” In the time since, he’s seen dramatic improvements across the board in Advanced Urgent Care’s practice management, clinical workflows, and financial stability.

Dr. Euser attributes this turnaround to athenaOne’s revenue cycle automation as well as the customizability and support of athenaOne for organizations with specialized workflows, including urgent care.

Getting paid on time, with less effort

Claims

When Advanced Urgent Care came back to athenaOne in 2019 after switching to an urgent care competitor for a year and a half, they had been struggling with getting paid in a reasonable amount of time using a competitor’s urgent care-specific software. “We had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on timely filing,” he said, due to the competitor’s lack of claims automations and continually updating claim data scrubbing – a capability built into athenaOne and informed by 3,500 urgent care clinicians and 10.3 million urgent care claims submitted annually.¹

On their previous EMR, the timeline estimates provided to Dr. Euser “didn’t make sense” to him at first. For example, he was told to expect an average of 60 days for Medicare claims to be processed, which meant more days in accounts receivable than he had been used to with athenaOne. Then he realized that the competitor software doesn’t scrub their charges the way athenaOne does.

On this other system, claims would be filed as initially entered, and then the back-and-forth with the insurance company would begin before a claim could be paid. The slowness and inefficiency were frustrating, according to Dr. Euser: “30 days goes by before they can re-send them in, and those re-sending procedures were very slow and poorly done.” In athenaOne, a sophisticated rules engine looks for missing or inaccurate data and uses AI-powered predictive analytics to suggest changes to the claims before they’re submitted. With this process, submitted claims have a much higher chance of being accepted the first time; in fact, the athenaOne urgent care clean claim submission rate is 98.2%.²

Dr. Euser says these are the things that are essential to consider when looking at EHR systems and cautions others to get under the hood to see how a system actually works before deciding. “It’s not the glitz, it’s not the shiny car, but these are the things that make a difference in getting money back.”

Card on File

According to Dr. Euser, every urgent care center should standardize keeping a patient card on file to process payments more quickly. At the EHR he transitioned to from athenaOne, he dipped his toes in the water of setting up that workflow and found it created more – not less – manual work for staff to collect, file, and follow up on patients with cards on file. This was counterintuitive and added even more frustration.

With athenaOne, he found the card on file workflow much more “slick” given the automation, so he went “whole hog.” His practice has made a concerted effort to get every patient to have a card on file, and they’ve seen a dramatic increase in patient pay yield, from 43.2% to 95.0% between January 2024 and January 2025. Their charge entry lag reflects the impact that this effort has had on the business– in the same timeframe, charge entry lag decreased from 46.5 days to 3.0 days.³

Workflows that work for you

Despite being an urgent care-specific EHR, Dr. Euser found that the competitor’s workflows weren’t as customizable or tailored for how his organization worked as athenaOne’s.

For example, while this competitor software had urgent care-specific templates, those templates were not editable. He compares athenaOne to a well-stocked pantry – there’s a multitude of ingredients to choose from, and once you know your organization’s recipe, you can find everything you need.

If you don’t know your organization’s recipe yet, that’s where the partnership with athenahealth comes in. Dr. Euser has a dedicated Customer Success Manager who specializes in urgent care – as do all urgent care organizations on athenaOne for Urgent Care. The athenahealth CSM works closely with him to define and track success for his organization. When discussing the improvement Dr. Euser has seen to his organization’s metrics on athenaOne, he was able to list some numbers off the top of his head, but also confidently stated that his CSM, “has our numbers down pat.” And athenahealth can use the power of its nationwide network of providers and healthcare practices and systems of all types and sizes to help individual organizations like Dr. Euser’s benchmark their metrics against others to gain additional insights to improve their recipe even more.

The improvements that Advanced Urgent Care has seen on athenaOne didn’t happen by magic or by accident. Dr. Euser and his CSM set goals and plans, they implemented solutions, and they’re seeing the progress they set out to make. As Dr. Euser stated, it’s not always the glitzy features that make a real difference - with athenahealth, you have a partner to help you address your organization’s unique challenges and needs, and that’s what keeps businesses thriving.

Are you wondering how athenaOne for Urgent Care can save your organization time and money? See for yourself, and set up time to ask for a demo – we'd love to share more.