Get time back for your small practice

Running a small medical practice can be incredibly rewarding. How many other professionals can say they serve their communities in such a direct and important way? Helping people is probably why you joined the medical field in the first place, and why you stay in this line of work.

The more difficult reality is the numerous operational challenges working against small practices. There’s often too much work to get done during regular working hours. The combined clinical and administrative burdens of documentation, submitting claims, and getting paid can quickly become unsustainable. You know as well as anyone––the result is often burnout.

One antidote to these challenges is more time. The good news is that the right tool can deliver significant efficiencies and time savings, especially for a small practice. athenaOne gives you the ability to offload or automate highly inefficient and manual tasks––both administrative and clinical––allowing you to reduce after hours work and spend more time with patients.

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how athenaOne can help you build sustainable, long-lasting processes and workflows for a more efficient and patient-centric practice. Below, we’ve identified four ways that athenaOne allows your staff to do their most important work.

1) Simplify documentation, easing the burden of “after hours” work

One of the more time-consuming parts of a physician’s day happens during documentation: cleaning up notes and completing documentation for patient encounters, reviewing lab results, submitting prescriptions, responding to patients’ messages, and more. It’s incredibly important work, but there often just isn’t enough time at the clinic to complete it all.

This is where “after hours work” often fills the gap. These are the long hours put in during evenings, weekends, and maybe even over a much-deserved vacation. According to a recent survey report from athenahealth, physicians spend an average of 15 hours each week working outside their normal working hours.¹

But our platform can help in a variety of ways. athenaOne’s simple and intuitive workflows help make documentation easier and less disruptive while you’re in the room with your patient. Intuitive workflows and customizable templates help you level-up the clinician experience and reduce documentation time and can even be tailored to your specific specialty or encounter type. Our platform can surface real-time patient data and insights from our network surfaced in your standard workflows, so you have the most up-to-date, accurate picture of your patient’s health during daily encounters.

2) Get accurate and up-to-date medical records, helping you provide comprehensive care

athenaOne enables clinical efficiency, helping make your time with patients more effective and productive.

Once it’s integrated, our platform can proactively surface clinical data from across our network of healthcare organizations, care sites, labs, and more, seamlessly into the patient record. That means you have a much more comprehensive snapshot of your patient’s health history the moment you start looking over their electronic chart. Not only can you see previous diagnoses and other notes from your patient’s previous visits, but you can also see the same kind of information from their other care providers—and you can then choose whether or not to add it to your records. The more current and accurate information you have, the more coordinated and effective care you can deliver to patients.

3) Optimize your financial performance, enabling you to drive growth

Financial wellbeing is critical to your success. But managing revenue as a healthcare provider is much more complex than most other businesses. How do you know if you’re getting paid everything you’re owed? How quickly can you expect payment for certain services?

athenaOne can help you answer these key questions to help you get a full picture of your practice’s financial performance.

With athenaOne, healthcare organizations can optimize financial performance, reduce administrative burden, and stay ahead of industry changes. We help simplify revenue cycle work from the beginning stages at appointment scheduling, all the way to securing full payment. Robust RCM benchmarking, reporting, and coaching help empower you to take control of your financial health, streamlining your revenue cycle management and boosting your healthcare organization’s success.

Our revenue cycle solution enables you to succeed under your unique reimbursement model and can help you make the shift into value-based care programs. Our quality performance experts and flexible technology help you stay ahead of the industry’s ever-changing regulatory requirements. We work with you throughout the plan year helping you course correct to optimize your results and help you capture reimbursement opportunities within your VBC payment model. athenaOne is a modern, sophisticated healthcare tool that puts more of the right information in your hands and enables you with innovative tools to run many parts of your practice more smoothly. In sum, these benefits help ensure that you collect more of what you’re owed, quickly and efficiently.

4) Empower patients to self-serve, saving time in your day

Your patients want to be able to do things themselves. With the right tools and self-serve experiences, they can take on some of the work you’ve been doing, like scheduling or rescheduling appointments, with just a few clicks—and do it when it’s most convenient for them.

athenaOne gives your patients the access they need to both schedule and adjust appointments, review and ask questions about test results, and reach out to their care team directly. Patients are also kept aware of what bills they owe, while being given multiple digital options for making payments when it’s convenient for them. athenaOne helps your practice foster stronger relationships with patients, but it does so while relieving administrative burden, freeing up time for you to provide care.

Access to athenaOne not only results in a better digital experience for your patients––who will feel more engaged with their care and more connected to your practice––it also saves you and your staff time that would otherwise be needed to manage all these tasks and requests on a daily basis.

Level-up your clinical efficiency with athenaOne

One of the great benefits of using athenaOne is that it includes a broad network and helpful services as well as software, and it can grow along with you. Depending on your specialty, the kinds of populations you serve, and the many characteristics that make your patients’ needs unique, our platform has offerings to help. athenaOne’s built-in suite of solutions, EHR, RCM, and patient engagement, helps your practice consistently deliver outstanding care to your patient population.

If you want to learn more about how athenahealth is helping small practices of all kinds do more with less, start here.

1. 2023 Physician Sentiment Survey, commissioned by athenahealth and fielded by Harris Poll, Jan 2024.