During the spread of COVID-19 across the country and globe, athenahealth continues to prioritize both the safety of our employees and the delivery of excellent service to our customers and communities. As the leading healthcare IT platform for ambulatory care, it is our customers who are on the front lines fighting against this virus—and they will continue to respond and treat this illness with the support of our ecosystem.

We have set up a 24-hour incident response team to stay in sync with the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization as well as local and state agencies, and athenahealth’s leadership team is meeting daily to make critical decisions to support our customers, our communities and our employees in the United States and India.

We’re weighing a number of factors, including guidance from local health departments, community transmission assessments, and our ability to continue essential work and deliver the products and services our customers rely on.

We’re also testing the resilience of our operations—and our products—by ensuring our own capacity to perform work remotely. And it is important to think about how we can help our local communities as we make these changes. Some of our offices have already shifted to a work-from-home status, ensuring business continuity, while others are still operating as normal.

In the meantime, we continue to support our customers through this difficult time.

• We are continuously updating our software to align existing product structures (Order Sets, Social History questions, etc.) with CDC best practice recommendations.
• athenaNet can be accessed remotely to message patients, and our athenaOne mobile app can also be used by providers to review and respond to Patient Cases via the app. We are also working to rapidly deploy enhanced online scheduling to all of our practices.

 

• For broader scale messaging, customers can use GroupCall to launch a campaign to affected patients in the case that there is a need to cancel patient appointments due to office closure or overload.

 

• Through our Coordinator Core Service, we’re working with our commercial lab partners who have joined the effort to provide national accessibility to COVID-19 testing and have ensured their lab-specific tests are linked to athena’s Global compendium as they come available.

 

• The epocrates mobile app for clinicians now features an interactive decision-tool based on the latest CDC’s authoritative guidance. In under 60 seconds, clinicians can access the CDC’s updated guidance relevant to their patient’s situation, directly from their mobile device.

 

• Telehealth technology is predicted to alleviate demands on healthcare providers as they triage their patients during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Our marketplace offers nine partners to help accommodate customers during this demanding time.

As the coronavirus situation continues to evolve, we will be thinking of even more ways we can be helpful to all of our users, partners, customers, and communities.