AI, interoperability, HIT partnerships take the stage at HIMSS 2025

athenahealth showcases automation, AI, and data exchange capabilities delivering real results to customers

The annual HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition gathers thousands of healthcare professionals, thought leaders, and companies in Las Vegas, and it is an event I always look forward to as a healthcare product development leader. This year was no exception.

In March 2025, HIMSS focused on the advancement and impact of technology across the industry. We at athenahealth were excited to share our work curing complexity in healthcare with new workflows leveraging artificial intelligence and new innovations highlighting our commitment to a thriving, open ecosystem.

athenahealth made a strong presence on the expo hall floor, in our partners’ booths, and throughout the event to demonstrate our progress. The key takeaways below provide a recap of HIMSS this year, and illustrate how athenahealth is plugging into the industry, listening to clinicians, and collaborating with partners to use technology to delight rather than disrupt.

Applying AI to problems clinicians want solved

athenahealth has been investing in AI capabilities for nearly a decade, focusing on one core principle: listening to our customers and building the solutions they need to thrive. If 2024 was the year AI (and particularly generative AI) gained significant attention in the healthcare industry, then 2025 has brought tangible applications, and, most importantly, real-world benefits utilizing AI to simplify healthcare common workflows. We were proud to partner with some of our athenaOne® customers to demonstrate how these innovations are changing care delivery and helping reduce burnout.

Among the top challenges clinicians face is documentation burden, which is why ambient listening and AI scribe capabilities have rapidly taken off in the past year. We recently announced a new athenahealth Marketplace Partner, Abridge, who joins Suki AI and iScribe as top vendors for our Ambient Notes AI-powered solution that automates clinician documentation directly into the patient’s electronic health record and during the clinician workflow.

Real examples of ambient AI technology changing clinicians’ lives

HIMSS participants visiting our interactive booth could see the machine learning, natural language processing, ambient listening, and generative AI capabilities of Ambient Notes, but I was especially excited to welcome Dr. Janelle Smith of Springfield Clinic to the Expo Hall Main Stage session to share how transformative athenahealth’s Ambient Notes has been to her practice.

Automating clinical documentation has not only saved her precious time after hours but also helped ensure she is capturing the full extent of patient encounters from both a clinical and billing perspective. Dr. Smith also emphasized the optimism from colleagues, noting how excited her fellow doctors are to be able to leverage AI in the clinical setting to gain time back during their day.

Following the session, I had a chance to talk with MobiHealthNews about the enhanced user experience athenahealth provides by embedding Ambient Notes directly into the athenaOne workflow. With one click, clinician SOAP notes are automatically added into the patient chart, so they can be reviewed and signed and the encounter closed on that same day.

This kind of time savings is part of what Dr. Smith and her colleagues get so excited about. Not only are they finishing their notes sooner and reducing their pajama time with their EHR, but they’re also accelerating their revenue cycle by getting claims submitted more promptly.

Claims can’t be sent to payers until clinical notes are in and the encounter closed. AI-powered listening and scribe solutions like Ambient Notes are helping clinicians improve their Same Day Encounter Closure Rates while removing the administrative burden of documenting the clinical note.

If 2024 was the year AI (and particularly generative AI) gained significant attention in the healthcare industry, then 2025 has brought tangible applications, discussions around ROI, and, most importantly, real-world benefits of healthcare AI software.

Delivering insights and value through interoperability

While AI was a trending theme at HIMSS 2025, interoperability remains a steadfast focus for the HIT industry. This year, real interoperability progress built upon cooperation and technological innovation is helping make the vision of interoperability closer to reality.

For our part, athenahealth is collaborating closely with partners and industry coalitions to bring streamlined, secure data exchange to patients and clinicians. We joined several of these partners in their booths, including ELLKAY, HL7, and CommonWell, to discuss shared collaboration and the real-world impact of next-level interoperability.

Through our role as a founding member of CommonWell, we have been deeply involved in advancing the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), a nationwide network-of-networks for health information exchange.

Our commitment to a future state of improved interoperability includes bringing our athenahealth customers along with us: instead of expecting them to jump through hoops, we are quickly and automatically migrating thousands of customers to the TEFCA protocols so that clinicians and patients can immediately benefit from this next-level information access and insights.

If TEFCA is about opening the pipes to enable healthcare data to flow across the ecosystem no matter where a patient received care, our ChartSync experience within athenaOne is about harmonizing the incoming data such as medication fill data, allergies, and lab results into the clinician workflow for more informed care.

HIMSS attendees could see ChartSync in action at our booth. We now also have a ChartSync demo video so you can see for yourself how it organizes and curates incoming data, making it easier for clinicians to find and act on information at the moment of care, when it matters most.

Partnering across the industry to drive better, more affordable care

There's nothing like bringing together companies from across the healthcare ecosystem to discuss key issues facing the industry, as well as collaborations and solutions that deliver real outcomes for customers. Here are a few HIT innovators we partnered with at HIMSS to highlight the ways working together can streamline workflows, solve business challenges, and improve practice performance and clinical outcomes.

• Consensus Cloud Solutions: Digital faxing is still a common way healthcare data is exchanged between clinicians and other providers such as labs, imaging, and other care sites. Consensus and athenahealth work together to ensure this exchanged information comes in quickly, is readily parsed and interpreted, and then shows up within the electronic health record where clinicians can find it and use it to deliver coordinated care.
• SureScripts: Prescription management is a key component of coordinated care and value-based care initiatives from both public and private payers. Technology plays a role here, from e-prescribing to health information exchange (HIE) for closing care gaps, from prior authorizations to checking for drug interactions across care teams. We’re partnering with SureScripts to make this important process easier, leveraging their vast network with ours for greater visibility and insights.
• Snowflake: We’re collaborating with Snowflake to roll out solutions aimed at improving operational efficiencies, including agentic AI capabilities that promise to further reduce administrative burden and help triage patient needs.

Earning industry awards for clinician-focused HIT solutions

We were also delighted to be recognized as a Winner’s Circle honoree in the Emerge Innovation Experience Contest for our partnerships and innovations with payers that improve clinical and financial outcomes for healthcare practices. It’s been a good year for athenahealth so far in terms of recognition for the work we are doing to cure complexity for healthcare practices and organizations of all sizes. In February, athenahealth received the 2025 KLAS Overall Independent Physician Practice Suite for the second year in a row, and we also earned two additional KLAS awards for our EHR and RCM capabilities within our flagship comprehensive solution, athenaOne.

Missed athenahealth at HIMSS but want to see what we’re up to?

You can find athenahealth at other key industry events in 2025, including Becker’s 15th Annual Meeting where our chief product officer Paul Brient will discuss improving the user experience and efficiencies of EHRs as part of a panel.

Where else we’re showing up:

• MGMA Tech Impact Conference (May): we will join one of our customers on a panel at MGMA’s Tech Impact Conference to discuss the attributes a technology partner finds most important to supporting the unique needs of any practice and facilitating sustained success.
• AHIP (June): curing complexity for ambulatory care practices means partnering with payers to reduce the frictions that can get in the way of coordinated, high quality care. We will be taking the stage with one of our national payer partners to share more about our collaboration.
• Region IX Clinical Excellence & Leadership Conference (CPCA)(June): our executive director of diversity and inclusion Allyson Livingstone will join a panel alongside three Bay Area Community Health members to discuss how community health centers can effectively implement equity best practices in their organizations, drawing insights from athenahealth's commitment to addressing health inequities.

And of course, all of our work builds up to our own athenahealth Thrive conference in Nashville, Tennessee in November 2025. If you’re already an athenahealth customer and haven’t yet experienced Thrive, see what the buzz is about and sign up to stay in the know.