It has become the need of the hour to implement a sound EHR software in a medical practice. Manually ensuring clinical quality measures and following the guidelines of regulatory bodies can become a rather impossible task. This is where an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system comes into action. It not only helps to streamline your routine administrative tasks but simplifies your clinical workflows as well. This enables the physicians to reduce their burden on repetitive tasks and focus more on ensuring optimum patient care. Among the many EHR softwares available in the market, athenahealth EHR is a rather popular choice for medical practices in the US.
What is athenahealth EHR?
Founded in 1997, athenahealth EHR is a cloud-based service provider, and its aim is to provide quality EHR services to medical practices all over the nation. With growth and advancement, this vision has evolved into a greater scope. Currently, athenahealth EHR provides sustainable, affordable, and quality healthcare services. Their services include:
- Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
- Medical Billing
- Enterprise Revenue Cycle
- Care Coordination
- Patient Engagement
athenahealth EHR provides a long and extensive list of benefits and advantages. In this article, we shall discuss some of the features that can streamline your operations and improve your return on investment (ROI) as well.
Monitoring and Improving
Physicians need to dedicate special focus and energy to make sure their medical practice runs efficiently and is paid on time. athenahealth EHR helps to simplify this process by providing valuable insights into the market trends and regarding the financial performance of your practice as well. In this way, it helps you make sure you achieve your financial goals.
One of the unique features that athenahealth EHR software offers is reviewing and monitoring your financial performance. Through this feature, they are able to identify red flags and inconsistencies within your financial performance. They provide creative and unique ways to resolve those issues through quarterly coaching and training sessions.
Automate Appointment Reminders
Now, the question is “How can automated appointment
reminders help me increase ROI?” Well, to give you a short answer, automated
appointments can improve patient health, enhance administrative efficiency, and
ensure patient satisfaction. In return, it helps to increase the ROI of your
medical practice. According to a study. practices that implement automated
appointment reminders witness an average of $10,000 increase in their annual
revenue.
Here’s how having an automated appointment reminder helps your practice:
Improving Patient Health: When
patients fail to show up for medical appointments, it not only results in the
loss of the practice but also the loss of medical care that the patient should
have received. This is where you can implement EHR services to help your
practice function better. It allows you to remind patients through automated
texts and emails, which can greatly increase the chances of patients showing up
for the appointment.
Enhancing
Administrative Efficiency: One
of the most significant advantages of having an automated appointment reminder
is that your staff does not need to spend time calling each patient for a
reminder. According to athenahealth customer reviews, this feature alone helped
practices save $50,000 in annual revenue for each staff member.
Ensuring
Patient Satisfaction: At times,
patients might be busy at work or they might not pick calls from unknown
numbers. However, a text or an email can help give them a reminder and doesn’t
distract them from their work either.
Billing “Rules Engine”
athenahealth EMR software offers a strategic feature called ‘Rules Engine’. The main objective of this feature is to make sure you receive your complete payment on time and to minimize deductions to the bare minimum. Now, you might think how is that possible?
Well, the answer is pretty simple. This billing feature keeps an eye out for semi-consistent billing requirements of your payers. Apart from this, it also looks out for changes in the guidelines of any regulator body. For example, E&M coding recently released a few changes that will take charge from Jan 1st, 2020, and onwards.
In addition, this feature also keeps your denies, underpaid, and rejects claims in checks in hopes of resubmission. This, along with keeping an eye on changes in the payer requirements, enables physicians to create opportunities to resubmit their denied, underpaid, and rejected claims. Thus, helping you receive your payments faster and increase your ROI.
Now let’s talk about the third feature that athenahealth EHR’s “Rules Engine” offers. Over 23,000 rules help them ensure that insurance claims pass at least 94% of the time on their first attempt. This is a 25% improvement over the industry average for the first pass as well. With all of these features combined into one service, In short, athenahealth ensures you receive faster and full payments.
Patient Outreach with AthenaCommunicator
One of the services offered by athenahealth EMR is AthenaCommunicator, which aids in driving patient retention. One of the key aspects of this service is the use of messaging for engagement and interaction with the patient. In fact, athenahealth guarantees a 46%increase in patient engagement.
You can also employ automatic reminders to customise your messages. This includes emails, text messages, and even phone calls. Through online appointment scheduling, patient texting, and their brand new telehealth solution, athenahealth improves patient engagement and satisfaction.
No-shows are significantly reduced when your patients are engaged with your practice. The number of patients who attend your practice will increase as no-shows decrease, resulting in more income for your organization. In this way, athenahealth employs patient loyalty and satisfaction to ensure that sales opportunities are not lost.
Conclusion – Change May Not Happen Overnight, but it Starts That Way
When it comes to delivering technology services to healthcare practices, athenahealth EHR is regarded as an all-rounder. EMR, practice management, business revenue cycle, care planning, and other resources are available via this cloud-based EHR as well. They not only deliver on these promises, but they also ensure that you achieve your full potential, particularly in terms of finances.
athenahealth will assist you by tracking and optimising your financial results, using the billing “Rules Engine,” automating appointment reminders, and ensuring patient satisfaction. Athenahealth is truly like no other when it comes to delivering EHR services.
