Driving clinical and revenue cycle efficiency from day one

Brandon Zabukovic, M.D. and his colleagues didn’t begin their medical careers in private practice. “We were all employed by a local health system and we quit four and a half, five years ago” to start up an independent practice of their own, he explains.

The team of three physicians and two nurse practitioners started Primary Care Partners in 2020. The South Bend, Indiana practice specializes in family medicine and addiction medicine. As a startup, they were concerned with managing costs while avoiding some of the challenges they had experienced as employed clinicians. They found their ideal solution in athenaOne®.

Highly usable solution, low cost of entry

When it was time to choose a primary care EHR and practice management solution for the emergent practice, the clinicians agreed that athenaOne was the solution they wanted in place on day one. Several practical factors contributed to their decision, based on their experiences as employed physicians and clinicians.

Dr. Zabukovic is the managing partner at Primary Care Partners. As he recalls, “We wanted something that was cloud-based. We did not want to have to manage a server and the infrastructure that would be required for a server-based EHR. We wanted something that had a pretty slick interface for the users, and we wanted something that didn’t require a lot of upfront money since we were doing a startup and we had to spend money on everything else.”

Dr. Zabukovic is clear about something else he didn’t want: excessive clicking. As he says of his previous primary care EHR, “Some of the EHRs that we had used before required a lot of clicking, and it took a lot of time to document a clinical visit. We were looking for a solution that would solve some of those problems so that it was easier to get through the appointment with good documentation and not get arthritis in my clicking finger.”

An intuitive interface that optimizes care delivery

According to Dr. Zabukovic, he and his team couldn’t be more thrilled with their choice of technology, particularly athenaOne’s electronic health record.

“I like it a lot. It’s the best EHR that I’ve used for what I need. I like the documentation. I like the speed that I can get through things. And it has a lot of things that make my life a lot better than it ever was during the 15 years of practice that I was in before.”

One feature making his life better—and patients’ lives as well, undoubtedly—is referral closure in the EHR. In his previous experience as an employed physician, referral closure is something Dr. Zabukovic says he never had. Now it’s an essential part of closing the loop with patients and empowering them to adhere to their care plan.

“If I order a task to order a referral, [the EHR] will alarm if I don’t get the results back, so that we understand, ‘Did the patient go? Do we need to get old records or do we need to contact the patient to get something scheduled that needed to be done?’” he says.

Another important time-saver is athenaOne’s intuitive primary care EHR design that works the way physicians and clinicians think. Dr. Zabukovic has found that the clinical information he needs to make informed decisions at the point of care is right at his fingertips.

“The chart is divided up in a way that’s easy to review. The search function—if I’m looking for their last A1C, I can just type A1C in the “Find” field and it’ll pull up all of the A1Cs. So it’s very easy to find what you need.”

Delegating revenue cycle tasks to drive practice efficiency

Efficient revenue cycle management shouldn’t require clinicians to divert time from their patients to handle cumbersome charge entry and related tasks. When setting up Primary Care Partners, Dr. Zabukovic and his colleagues knew from experience how important it is to keep those non-clinical tasks off the clinicians’ plates. At their previous employer, he says, “A lot of the problems that we faced before were related to charge entry and creating that super bill. It was a lot of extra work for the providers to generate that.”

He reports that relying on athenaOne’s primary care practice management product and services has made a measurable difference all around. At Primary Care Partners, the average Collection Yield is 92.4 percent, while the average Days in Accounts Receivable is about 27.* “Just thinking about athenaOne now, our days in A/R are much better than they ever were with our previous organization, and it's a lot easier for us to just get charges out.”

Authorization Management accelerates care delivery with less work

One decision Dr. Zabukovic and his colleagues made shortly after going live on athenaOne was to add athenaOne® Authorization Management, an optional extended revenue cycle management service. When a practice submits an eligible order, the Authorization Rules Engine immediately checks it against continuously updated payer requirements to determine if medical authorization is needed. If it is, athenahealth’s authorization specialists communicate directly with payers to submit documentation, follow up on status, and manage the authorization to completion.

For a small start-up, having the extra support was a matter of necessity. “We’re a small practice without a lot of staff, so we didn’t really have a person dedicated to managing prior authorizations, which are a big drag on time,” says Dr. Zabukovic. “So, to the degree that we can offload some of that work to athenahealth, it’s been very helpful for us.”

Another benefit of using athenaOne Authorization Management is that it has enabled the practice to accelerate care delivery for its patients. Dr. Zabukovic explains, “We put out a lot of orders in the course of a week. Now, whether it’s for a diagnostic test or for a consultation, we’re able to get prior authorizations to the place that we’re referring to more quickly.”

A better experience for patients—and clinicians

When asked whether he and his colleagues are satisfied with their decision to use athenaOne, Dr. Zabukovic is unhesitatingly positive. athenaOne enables Primary Care Partners’ clinicians to focus on patients—and as Dr. Zabukovic explains, that attention helps drive better care outcomes.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re running people through a turnstile because we have that extra time with patients,” he says. “It makes sense that clinical outcomes follow behind that. If providers are happy and patients are happy, good things happen medically.”

He goes on to say, “As clinicians, we all just want to spend as much time with our patients as possible. So, to the degree that we can cut down on the non-direct patient care parts of our job, that spares time for us to do what we all entered into the profession for, which is just to work with patients directly.”

Having athenaOne as Primary Care Partners’ technology partner has enabled these clinicians to practice medicine the way they want to: compassionately. According to Dr. Zabukovic, the independent South Bend start-up has found its ideal solution. “All of us that are in the practice all agree, based on our experience with prior EHRs, that athenaOne is the best solution we’ve ever had.”