AthenaHealth

[Verna]

Our CAH hospital is currently using NextGen (Harris bought them recently) and have to find another EMR within the year. AthenaHealth was here last week showing us what their system could do. Have any of you worked with the Athena EMR hospital version?

Thanks,
Verna

 

[rgonzalez16]

athena

I used athena clinicals (clinic version) im curious how the hospital version works. Did yall implement this afterall?

 

[kimaez]

We are just starting with AthenaHealth due to our old software sundowning.

I am working for a single physician office and do many jobs besides coding and billing. I am seeing some advantages to this company but Who else is using and what do you like or dislke.

 

[sfigg]

Cpc

we currently use Athena on the Clinic side and it is pretty user friendly. It will do most jobs. The biggest complaint I have is the support. Their support has gone down hill.
I have not used it on the hospital side.

 

[cmraymond]

Haven't used it hospital side, I'm in small practice. They say "we'll work all this stuff for you", um, no. Either it doesn't get done for months or it doesn't get done properly. Had to sort out an overpayment situation this week, claim looked overpaid, it wasn't, what they did made it look overpaid, but it was paid in accordance with the capitation contract.
I haven't had support problems except in interface areas, that's the sticky part.

 

[CodingKing]

Haven't used it hospital side, I'm in small practice. They say "we'll work all this stuff for you", um, no. Either it doesn't get done for months or it doesn't get done properly. Had to sort out an overpayment situation this week, claim looked overpaid, it wasn't, what they did made it look overpaid, but it was paid in accordance with the capitation contract.
I haven't had support problems except in interface areas, that's the sticky part.

Considering Athena doesn't work the EOB/RAS, i'm not surprised. They were a nightmare to deal with as the insurance company, spent hours on the phone with staff in India calling for information that was right on the RAS.

 

[fullyalive05]

We started using Athena in May. I hate it. It isn't user friendly at all to me. I haven't seen very much positive out of the switch. I would recommend staying away. You can read their reviews online...they are awful. It's added more work on everyone. The training was awful too. One of the guys that was supposed to train me and another lady was on his cell the whole time on a conference call. I ended up just learning it on my own. They didn't seem to care too much after they already had our business.

 

[Hdean]

I used Athena from 2016-2018 and I was hired to clean-up after Athena. They left a lot to be desired. The system is pretty, but it doesn't function as smoothly as I like. They make doing anything on the billing side a hassle with their "kick codes". Also in my opinion the support side was lacking. It would sometimes take weeks to get a response to a question asked and usually the response was a parrot of something that had already been stated and not a helpful response.

Heather Jones, CPC, CPB
Absolute Practice Solutions
(ph) 336-422-7824

 

[Verna]

Update

We have had Athena EMR for a year, and it has been a huge disappointment. We were given a lot of promises, but found that most of them were not delivered.
1. We have a dictation service, and wanted to scan unsigned dictation into Athena for the providers to eSign (we had this capability in our former EMR). Athena told us it was possible, but I later found out that the providers could not eSign these in Athena. They had to go into our dictation service and sign them, then we would scan them in.
2. We were disappointed to learn that we could not create or name scanning buckets. Athena told us that, "they had so many buckets, and we would always find a perfect one." Untrue. Their buckets are cumbersome and it's very difficult to find one that suits us.
3. Athena told us that they don't make money if we don't make money. They said that we would have excellent customer support. Not true. I have a folder full of tickets opened with customer support that are not getting taken care of.

There are so many other problems, but please beware if you're thinking of buying this software for your hospital. The clinic version is much easier to work with, but it was not built for hospital use.