Advancing Value-Based Care, Improving Workflows, and Enhancing Interoperability: athenahealth’s latest Product Release Highlights

For most clinicians and practices, today’s healthcare environment is undeniably complex. Ambulatory practices must care for patients, manage practice operations, operate within multiple reimbursement structures, and navigate ever-changing regulatory and reporting requirements. At athenahealth, we support clinicians in all aspects of their practice so that they can focus on delivering exceptional care to their patients. Our July product release contains several new features and updates, all geared toward our mission of curing complexity and simplifying the practice of care.

Managing the Transition to Value-Based-Care

According to our annual Physician Sentiment Survey, physicians who use both fee-for-service and value-based-care payment models feel more financially secure than those who use either model alone. athenahealth continues to make broad investments that help practices manage care and payment models that support their patients and optimize their financial performance.

To succeed with value-based care, many practices turn to ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations) to pool risk and gain resources that can improve quality of care. In our July release, athenahealth began offering a new solution, Platform Services for ACOs. Platform Services for ACOs seamlessly connects independent practices with ACOs to facilitate the flow of information that delivers critical value-based care insights back to practices, surfacing care gaps for the clinician, or providing visibility into hospital readmissions.

Improving workflows so they work like clinicians do

Earlier this year we announced a set of tailored specialty solutions that pair all the benefits of athenaOne with capabilities that meet the specific needs of specialties and sites of care. One of our new solutions is athenaOne for Women’s Health. With our latest product update, women’s health providers now have a new OB workflow that supports an entire pregnancy episode. Recognizing that women’s health providers deliver tailored care at every stage of a women’s health journey and pregnancy, we’re improving their in-product experience to make critical patient information (like diagnoses and lab results) more easily accessible within the patient chart, while also streamlining routine documentation of OB visits.

Across all specialties, we know that intuitive processes can greatly reduce the administrative burden that leads to clinician burnout, while enhancing patient care and satisfaction. Thus, another area of focus has been around increasing efficiency and easing burnout through improvements to athenaOne workflows. To that end, other recent updates include an improved Clinical Inbox designed to ensure quick, efficient access to relevant patient information at the moment of care, as well as an improved care plan layout that eases documentation burden, allowing for a more focused, personalized level of care.

athenahealth also released further improvements to its Revenue Cycle management processes, making it easier and faster for patients to pay bills online, while enabling practices to receive revenue faster, with fewer administrative resources.

Advancing Interoperability Efforts

At HIMSS in March, athenahealth previewed an upcoming feature, ChartSync, that brings the promise of interoperability closer to the reality of clinician experience. athenahealth’s commitment to prioritize interoperability goes beyond making connections to actually ensuring clinicians get the right information, at the right time, natively in their workflow – so that data and information from other sources is easily available, and actionable.

In our latest release, we have progressed Alpha testing of ChartSync, with new capabilities that allow clinicians to view and reconcile patient information from multiple EHRs and other external sources directly in the clinical workflow. ChartSync scans external sources, identifies key clinical data (including allergies, medications, and test results), deduplicates redundant data, and surfaces new information within the clinical workflow. Clinicians are notified in the patient’s chart when new clinical data is available and can auto-reconcile results.

ChartSync functionality and availability will continue to expand over the next several months, with the end goal of creating a true longitudinal patient record so clinicians can provide informed, personalized care.

Throughout the changes and challenges in the U.S. healthcare system, our vision – in the Product organization as well as across the company – remains steadfast: to build a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.