If you are looking for health management software, you might be interested in checking out Athenahealth Reviews. As a stand-alone product, this health management software doesn’t provide a full outsourced RCM solution. As a result, this health management software is quite difficult to use and can be expensive. Here’s a look at some of the main pros and cons of this health management software. The pros outweigh the cons.
Athenahealth is a stand-alone product
Athenahealth has a number of useful features that make it easier to organize patient schedules. The central dashboard allows you to see the schedule for all scheduled appointments, including their billing information. You can also set up recurring appointment reminders via email and phone. In addition, you can customize the reminders so that they appear in a specific order or have a particular frequency and timeframe.
Athenahealth’s scheduling feature keeps patients informed about their appointments, including reminders for insurance changes, and the ability to submit intake forms. The software also displays insurance information, such as deductibles and copays, so you can tailor payment plans to your patients’ needs. You can also take advantage of the practice management software’s ability to identify inefficiencies and recommend improvements. A number of integrations are available, including HIPAA-compliant EHRs and other software systems.
Athenahealth’s target market is the smaller ambulatory physician segment. Its pricing model is aligned with the secular growth in U.S. health care spending. This segment is experiencing increasing consolidation, as larger providers seek to operate at a scale. Additionally, the American Medical Association reports that the proportion of physicians working in practices with 10 or fewer doctors declined from 61.4% in 2012 to 56.5% in 2018. This trend suggests that athenahealth is targeting a smaller segment of the market than it was in the past.
The company’s cloud-based EHR is a comprehensive suite of software for medical practices. It has a patient engagement module, as well as modules for practice management, billing, and electronic health records. And the software is configurable, with virtually limitless filters. The dashboard displays key metrics such as accounts receivable, no-shows, and cancellations. The system also provides access to data from up to 150,000 practices in the athenaNet network.
Athenahealth is one of the leading providers of web-based practice management, electronic health record, and patient communication services. The company will now offer its web-based EHR as a stand-alone offering. It is important to note, however, that athenahealth clients must adopt its athenaCollector and athenaClinicals platforms in order to use its services. Thus, the stand-alone option will provide greater flexibility to clients.
Doesn’t offer a fully outsourced RCM solution
Athenahealth Reviews doesn’t offer an outsourced RCM solution, but it’s a decent, easy-to-implement alternative to Epic. Like Epic, Athena supports proprietary devices, which can be a pain. However, this can make purchasing, insurance scanning, and patient registration easier. That said, it’s still a bit pricey. Overall, it’s still a better option than many other providers.
Another reason why Athenahealth doesn’t offer a fully outsourced solution is that it doesn’t offer a fully outsourced medical coding service. Customers must hire a medical coder for their practice or find another company to perform that task. Not all medical billing services include medical coding, but Kareo’s partners do. If this is important to you, read the Kareo reviews.
Athenahealth Reviews doesn’t offer an outsourced RCM solution, but its software offers several other benefits. While this may be a downside, advanced RCM solutions can help independent physicians improve their revenue and improve patient relations. Compared to manual billing, outsourcing can speed up the revenue generation cycle and lower write-offs. It also provides support for complex RCM issues, such as missing data.
Athenahealth’s RCM solution provides comprehensive reports and a rules engine that helps keep the first-pass acceptance rate above the industry average. The company will also handle denials, although athenahealth doesn’t disclose its criteria for denial management. This could be a problem if a practice is looking to outsource its entire billing and RCM process.
The company isn’t a fully outsourced RCM solution, but its revenue cycle management services are impressive. Its medical billing and back-office billing software, athenaCollector, help physicians focus on the patient. The company also boasts proprietary software and a constantly updated database of payer reimbursement rules. While it doesn’t provide a fully outsourced RCM solution, it’s a viable fit for larger HCIT players. However, large physician practices aren’t the only organizations that will opt to outsource RCM.
Difficult to use
One of the first things you notice about Athenahealth is the complexity of the software. You must spend considerable time and energy training your staff members to use it. It can even contradict messages that you want to send patients. For example, you need to add reminders for appointments to a patient’s schedule. And what about the patient? Can they simply access this information from any device? Thankfully, the answer to these questions is a resounding “yes.”
Despite its complexity, the interface of Athena is easy to navigate. While the service is not without its problems, most users felt it was well-designed and very easy to use. Users also experienced very little system downtime. However, there were some complaints about its claims functionality. Some users complained of the inaccuracy of data, which they couldn’t determine. However, athenahealth is a useful tool for healthcare organizations, so its complexity is only a minor drawback.
Many physicians believe that athenahealth is difficult to use, but a trial offer will let them test it out first. Those who have used the service say it has a complex user interface, but the benefits are worth it. The platform allows for unlimited customization. Users can access their medical records from anywhere on the internet. Its cloud-based product offers a user-friendly interface, while hosted products help administrators manage billing data and generate reports. In addition to this, athenahealth’s Gamify tool helps managers track the performance of their team. Gamify features include manager dashboards, leaderboards, feedback, authorization management, claim scrubbing, and zero pay resolution.
AthenaHealth is also difficult to use. Many providers underrate the importance of human factors in the transition, focusing only on the bottom line. They pay low upfront for the system and then nickel and dime for customizations. But the overall cost of Athena is lower. You should use the system only when it’s proven to be beneficial to your business. This way, you’ll minimize the chance of costly downtime.
Costly
While Athenahealth is a reputable company, its stock isn’t cheap. Private equity firms paid $5.7 billion for the company to go private in 2019. The software is designed to streamline communication between patients and doctors and medical billing and record-keeping processes. As a result, athenahealth stock hasn’t been generating much free cash flow in recent years, and the company’s price is too high for its potential upside.
Athenahealth offers personalized consulting, which may be an asset for practices that want a more personalized approach to health care. It’s also best suited for new and small practices that want to lower their medical software costs while still enabling them to provide high-quality care. It’s not a good fit for practices that are looking to fully outsource their revenue cycle management or have many non-tech-savvy team members.
Athenahealth has extensive billing capabilities, including the ability to customize weekly and monthly reports. These tools go far beyond the reporting capabilities of other medical software programs. Athenahealth allows users to customize reports in virtually any way they choose, including filtering large amounts of data to reveal valuable insights. One example is the Revenue Overview, which shows how many charges are being made versus how much money is collected. Athenahealth has an in-house medical biller responsible for creating and posting patient insurance and reviewing ICD-10 and CPT codes. The company guarantees that claims are paid within two to three business days.
While many other best EHR software companies charge extra for setup, Athenahealth is one of the few that doesn’t. Its implementation typically takes four to six weeks, although this can increase if you need to import data from another platform. You’ll have a dedicated account representative throughout the entire setup process, and they can stay in touch after the go-live date. So whether or not Athenahealth is right for your practice is a personal decision.
Athenahealth provides a dashboard that lists scheduled appointments, patient billing information, and more. This makes it easy to schedule and manage patients. In addition, users can set up recurring appointment reminders by email or phone. They can even test different reminder methods. However, the price does matter. It’s a good value for money if you’re considering athenahealth as a health IT system for your practice.
