Optimizing interoperability with athenaConnect™

Meet a powerful EHR interoperability solution with the transparency you need

Reliable data exchange is crucial for healthcare practices to deliver efficient, high-quality care and achieve financial success in value-based care (VBC) programs. But sometimes there are obstacles in the path of EHR interoperability, such as a lack of visibility into the connections in place or the data being exchanged, or outdated and unneeded connections slowing the system down.

When data connections aren’t optimized, the consequences can be serious. For instance, practices may be unaware of essential test results, fail to close care gaps, or struggle to meet the performance metrics tied to their value-based care contracts. All of these can affect patient outcomes and practice reimbursements.

One crucial step in optimizing EHR interoperability is gaining visibility into the data connections. How can practices know whether they have the right connections and that the right data is being exchanged? Is there a “fuse box” they can check, or is the system more like a black box, inscrutable and impossible to access? Not all HIT solutions are built to provide the necessary transparency. The athenaOne® solution is—thanks to a feature called athenaConnect™.

Solving EHR interoperability challenges

Every medical practice relies on lots of connections with outside entities, from acute care settings to labs and imaging centers, pharmacies, state vaccine registries, payers, and many others. (As just one example, athenahealth customers leverage 155 ready-to-use connections on average.¹) When data is flowing properly between systems and applications, clinicians can make more informed decisions and patients can receive more continuous care.

athenaConnect is a central hub for athenaOne’s technical users, allowing them to easily view their practice’s integration with the broader healthcare ecosystem and analyze data exchange patterns. This free resource enables organizations to track data flow, identify gaps in their interoperability strategy, and take proactive steps to resolve information exchange issues. The benefits to organizations are enormous:

• Unparalleled visibility via a centralized dashboard: Easily see connections, understand exchanged information, and track data volume to improve operational efficiency.
• Less hands-on effort: Spend less time manually keeping track of active and inactive connections to other care sites.
• Data-driven insights: Analyze data exchange volume to make informed decisions about interoperability efforts.

athenaConnect unlocks a new level of transparency, empowering customers to view their network connections to make informed decisions about integration configuration. Here are three ways that athenaConnect can help healthcare organizations address interoperability issues and get back on track.

1. Proactive interoperability management

With athenaConnect, medical practices can understand who they're sharing data with, and how much data is being exchanged. They can drill down into individual connections to understand the data exchange patterns. This enables organizations to optimize their integrations, identify trends, and track performance to improve operational efficiency and reduce technology spend.

Having viable connections to external patient data is central to meeting the goals of VBC programs, such as identifying care gaps, tracking performance metrics, and ensuring timely interventions.

2. Ready insights for IT leaders

athenaConnect’s simple and intuitive visualization provides the information that healthcare IT teams need to make the most of existing connections and identify areas for improvement. For example:

• They may realize they’ve been paying for an app that their clinicians aren’t currently taking advantage of.
• Their staff may not be leveraging an interface that would allow them to send orders digitally.

athenaConnect helps IT leaders see which connections are active so they can resolve issues quickly, mitigating potential disruptions to clinical workflows and patient outcomes.

3. Enhanced Value-Based Care success

For practices to provide the best care for patients, they need to have a complete picture of their patients’ care, including care that took place elsewhere. Having reliable access to external patient data is central to meeting the goals of value-based care programs, such as identifying care gaps, tracking performance metrics, and ensuring timely interventions.

That’s why healthcare data interoperability is so important. With the visibility provided by athenaConnect, practices can understand where their information is coming from, as well as the status of their connections to external care data, so they can meet contract requirements, secure reimbursements, and achieve performance bonuses, all while delivering better patient outcomes.

EHR interoperability integrated within athenaOne

As a free tool available to athenaOne customers, athenaConnect provides a centralized dashboard that allows medical practices to see all their integration data in one easy-to-navigate place. This empowers organizations to “check under the hood” to see who they’re connected to, which data is being exchanged, and how much traffic is moving through their integrations.

By leveraging the centralized visibility provided by athenaConnect, practices can ensure that their athenaOne implementation is working at its full potential. Optimizing interoperability helps to simplify their clinicians’ experience, who can leverage the right external data at the point of care.

Today, athenaConnect allows practices to easily view their practice’s integration with the broader healthcare ecosystem. Future iterations of athenaConnect will allow athenaOne customers and partners to manage and control their integrations.

From connectivity to true EHR interoperability solutions

athenaConnect supports the connectivity that’s needed across an ecosystem of healthcare entities to facilitate data exchange. But at athenahealth, we know that ambulatory practices need more than just data exchange: they need the right answers when it matters. athenahealth goes beyond connectivity to contextualize the information received in the EHR from other care sites. Doing so saves clinicians time and work, delivering the right data at the right time so they can make informed, real-time decisions for patient care.

We also collaborate with our customers as a partner to help them get the most value out of the platform. That includes implementation and onboarding teams to help them access external information from day one, plus partnerships that help our customers build the best tech stack for their needs.

As a single-instance, multi-tenant, cloud-based solution, athenaOne offers an advantage that other solutions don’t: our shared platform. Instead of having each practice build its own individual data connections which only that practice can see and manage, we’re able to build global connections that every practice on our network can leverage. That gives us visibility into our collective data exchange across our network, which we then extend to customers so they can see where their data comes from and where it’s going.

Ready to learn more?

If you’re interested in advanced, effective interoperability that provides more than just a data connection, get in touch. With the visibility provided by the free athenaConnect feature, athenaOne can help your practice overcome the challenges of interoperability in healthcare, improve patient care, and achieve success in value-based care.

Request a demo to explore how athenaConnect works within athenaOne and how enhanced visibility into healthcare data interoperability can benefit your organization.