athenaOne Reviews

Amazing...I have no plans to change at this time as Athena provides me with the best EHR experience I have had in many years!

Marketed as a product for multiple disciplines and specialties, however, does not support occupational therapy services. OTs are told to use PT templates and configurations despite (1) potential conflicts with documentation for reimbursement and (2) being initially told that OTs were a supported discipline.
Account managers are not useful as they refer back to the service center for all issues. It is an endless cycle. Not knowingly, we were not set up properly before launch, and despite repeatedly telling the AM that the system wasn't sufficient for us and that we had to work harder to make it work for us, 7 months later we find that ours is not configured as it should have been. This was discovered after connecting in The community on The resource hub, which is another brush off that The managers refer clients to repeatedly, as well add o-help. There has been no response on this or even consideration of trying to keep a client happy by an account manager.
The system is severely lacking and counterintuitive, and if individuals make suggestions for improvement, they are "voted on" for consideration, even if the suggestions or requests are standard in the industry or required by governing bodies. Many requests and improvements are not made. We truly question is up to date and compliant.
Clients are told to create templates, or modify current (such as a standard facesheet), by coding them independently. Most medical practitioners (1) are not coders and (2) are not paying for a service that requires more time and effort than less. I was actually told by a higher level account manager that the solution could be to hire an outside coding agency to complete this task (vs it being standard in the existing product or have a dedicated person in Athenahealth that assists with coding needs).
The therapist reviews in the hub are not favorable. Individuals considering purchase of system would never know how many years of complaints exist and "make it work" scenarios. Unfortunately, changing EMRs is not simple and quick and is often costly. The billing portion is fair but mistakes are still made with submission requiring extra time in "hold" and delays in reimbursement. AthenaClinicals is just horrible.
There is a definite environment fostered within Athena that is brush off, dodge issues, let clients figure it out, and if they leave "oh well." We are disheartened and infuriated at the same time. If our practice had the same reviews, both public and internally, I would be very ashamed, take a step back,
and wonder where things went wrong, let alone REALLY wrong.
Bottomline: if anyone sees this who is considering Athena, regardless of discipline, go with another service provider. We as existing clients see ALOT in the community feedback on our resource hub. You will be entering something that you will then be prepared to get out of with excess cost.

Overall I have enjoyed my use and time with AthenaHealth. I truly appreciated the in depth knowledge the trainers provided, and the time they spent with us following training to ensure we had all of our bases covered.

We really like AthenaOne and are learning new things about it monthly. It is convenient and easy to use once you learn it. There are so many ways that AthenaOne makes everything easier that you almost get spoiled once you learn how to do something the easy way.

Poor, we were promised that it was going to do machine learning so that it would learn our protocols and tendencies, I have seen none of this.

overall outstanding and continues to improve- very smart people!

My overall experience is great! I have used other ehrs and I find this one to be pleasant on the eyes, intuative and informative.

Easy access to clinical providers through Athena Secure Messaging for almost instantaneous responses.

Had a great overall experience with AthenaOne.

In general I relate to the mission of Athena and see the work happening to address the hard issues in healthcare which feels supportive.

We are a Family Medicine Residency which makes managing the clinic more complex for us than most clinics because our providers are all part-time, there's Faculty over site of the Residents, and they are learning. We went live 2 1/2 years ago with 75 end-users and have been very successful with Athena. Implementation took about 2 1/2 months and was up to full schedules within 5 weeks of go-live. We've added on Dulcian CCM software which has helped us earn a lot of income doing CCM just documenting time we were missing in our old EHR. We've also implemented electronic check in which has helped get more historical information in our charts and more screeners completed on our patients. We realized a 1 FTE decrease in Medical Records and have realized savings in other areas.

AthenaOne allowed our business to consolidate many of our third-party apps into one complete EHR system.

AthenaHealth EHR is an affordable way for a small practice to have a quality EHR. I pay a percent of my collections. I like the tie between what I get paid determines what Athena gets paid. That gives Athena a healthy interest in my business' financial performance.

On 7/14, I was notified by a member of our clinical staff that the entire practice would need to go through this training, that it wasn't only for the nurses and physicians. I called Athena for verification and was told that only nurses and physicians needed to follow the training guides.; that it would not affect Billing or any other department. When I pulled the individual within my practice who pointed this out to me to discuss the issue with the Athena rep on the phone, we pointed out that there was special training specifically for the Front Desk Receptionists. It was also mentioned that the Classic view would go away, leaving a Non-Clinician and Clinician view. These affect the entire practice. The rep changed his answer to it may be beneficial to let your receptionists know of this training, but no one else needs it. I went home that even and sat through all of the training. Out entire staff did need to review this information, clinical staff needed Clinical information while clerical staff needed the Front Desk piece because it touched on many things that everyone uses: how to find documents, how to find tasks, how to change views, etc. Friday I sent all clerical staff an e-mail letting them know that training needed to be completed by Monday evening as we had been mislead by Athena, that it wasn't just clinical staff that needed this training, that this new rollout would affect everyone. 7/19 was chaotic because the print margins were reset on many computers to enable shrink to fit with this update, which was not selected before. All of our forms were printing miniaturized until this was figured out. Formatting changes made prior reports read as garbled nonsense. Diagnosis codes were taken away from an area we reference on a daily basis. Instead of going to the chart and clicking on something we want to print (two clicks), it now takes at least 5 clicks (Chart>Visits>Date>Double Arrow>Full Encounter>Print). Half of the time, this does not even print and I have to open up Google Chrome to which it prints a few words and the top two lines of the dictation on page one and the rest of the dictation is on page two. Instead of being able to print 1 page (old facesheet) that has the demographics, insurance, and upcoming appt. on it for our facilities to load our patients into their system for injections, it is no longer an option. When you try to print similar page, the text overlaps and prints on top of each other. Summary: many useful features removed.

As stated above, since our Athena "Go Live" 2 1/2 years ago I have been able to reduced our medical practice overhead, reduce staff, all while increasing revenue, and providing to our providers and staff a manageable clinic day. At the end of each day, all messages and calls are returned to patients and the days charts completed.

Hi. Quite surprised to read other reviews actually. Im a pod... starting in private practice with emr "Cerner"... hated it. always have, always will...although it has been at least 2 yrs since I've seen Cerner in action. My wife, another doctor, actually uses practice fusion...one of the many free online web based servers. I started with athena bc to me, starting out on my own (literally), it was the easiest one-stop-shop. Learning the system is not hard, it is quite easy. From beginning to end, I can literally -meet/greet/take copays, finish intake, perform and document my exam, treat the patient, proceed to check out and r/s and finally to billing- in all of...maybe 10-15 min...thats with NO staff. Done, seen, treated, billed! I like that. If a new patient, will be bit longer of course with intake, BUT that step is very rate limiting depending on who you have doing it.
I find ease, use and flow to be great. Rarely glitches, but yes there are some. Can easily work on 3-4 charts at once.

When we first signed on with Athena almost 5 years ago things were OK. It seemed like they provided us with the onboarding help we needed, but, in the last year, it has been beyond terrible. You probably won't believe what I am about to say, but it is 100% true. 2 years into using Athena, we decided to change our practice name and speciality, and essentially needed to start another 'company' with all new tax ID etc. It required us to essentially onboard and become credentialed from the beginning again. I was assigned to someone named [SENSITIVE CONTENT] to work with this. We were about 7-8 months into the process when I started having the feeling that something was wrong, because no one was asking us for any information. I kept emailing and calling [SENSITIVE CONTENT] for reassurance that everything was going according to plan because our go live date was coming up. We had put out a lot of messaging to our patients that this big change was coming etc. I must have asked at least 6 or 7 times for clarification and he kept responding that everything was good to go. We 2 days before our go live date my rep called and apologized as she told me that actually, nothing had happened. The implementation of the new practice had been started or gotten off the ground. Apparently it had not 'gotten assigned to anyone in the right department'. Of course I was livid and just essentially dropped the process because Covid was happening and there was too much other stuff going on at the time.

Athena has a great and robust reporting module especially helpful for practices attesting for meaningful use and PCMH, the problem with this is that it is difficult to do on your own and requires a Customer service ticket which takes a long time to get answered.

The charting is easy once you get your templates setup. If you do not do this on the front end (during implementation) getting help to do later is impossible and you will need help as it is not very intuitive. Many templates were lost during one of their upgrades without warning so it has been difficult to rebuild them. We have grown and added locations while on Athena and because they are your primary biller if they do not verify all of the credentialing that you send them you cannot bill. This was problematic because you cannot directly talk to the persons doing this there is always a go-between with Athena.

I love the EPCS for patients requiring a schedule, as a pediatrician I have quite a few ADHD pts and nice not to worry about assessing where prescriptions really lost! No need for paper. However, with one of their upgrades, I can no longer save medications so must write sig and quantity for every medication each time which is time-consuming.

Lastly, the promised billing has failed our practice. The workflow was to be we would not need a biller and get increased revenue with clean claims. We see a large Medicaid population and were not told that they had virtually no experience with that and even going to them with specifics as to the problem it would still take upwards a month to fix. Not only have we not gotten rid of our biller but increased his time as many Medicaid claims he submits thru the portal yet Athena charges us for this. The account managers are unavailable in meetings vacations or no longer with the company.
Pros: Reporting, Easy charting once template is created, EPCS, Integration of charges to the superbill
Cons: Customer support, E-prescribing, Not reasonable expectation to not need a biller, Overpriced, not a good fit if you are a practice that adds services, providers, or locations, must use their bank to receive payments and then it takes 1-2 days to get transferred to your business account

Poor. what else can i say? If you had a question, you were routed to someone in pakistan who knew little to nothing about your billing but would read a paragraph they were given to tell you. It was silly.
Seriously, most of you know all billing companies kinda suck. But this is one of the worst. Athena was the main reason I closed by private practice. I considered switching billing companies, but I just got tire of dealing with it. Take my advice, DO NOT use AthenaOne for billing. The EMR portion is soso, middle of the road. Billing portion is 3 thumbs down.

I started working w/Athena in Aug 2016. Since then our Admin has been advising me to call or web chat, search online & use the search features Athena has to offer. I have NEVER gotten a question resolved by calling. I end up walking the "helper" through the features & page. This was very upsetting. I've been put on hold for 20 minutes at a time while an "advisor" looks up a solution in their manual. As a result, I hung up in frustration. I then received an e-mail confirming my problem had been resolved. What a joke! That seems like it is just to appease the numbers needed. There are no training manuals, no courses to take & definitely nobody to teach a person how to use this program. A rep. who no longer works for Athena set us up years ago. This is not geared towards a specific practice, which is even more frustrating. Hopefully, you can respect the time I took to write this review & improve your program. It would be great to receive training as well, or at least an instruction manual.

As a smaller local hospital we did not utilize Athena for our hospital ERM however our physicians network did. The system utilized by the hospital and Athena utilized by the physicians network did not communicate therefore information would need to be manually obtained for a patient who had a primary care physician within our own network that had been admitted to our hospital. Confusing for both nursing staff and the patient who was having to give a complete history and physical all over again. I was granted access to the Athena to act a liaison between hospital and physician. I found while utilizing Athena that it provided a valuable quick overview of patient demographics, medical history, medications, etc. However, while reviewing things such as medications I found that the system allowed not only for duplications but for entries to be saved as "free text" or saved while incomplete (missing drug strength, frequency, etc.). I was also disappointed to find that while I had access to this information, there was no quick way to share the information with other providers other than to print and fax or hand carry to patient chart on the hospital floor. A positive thing about Athena was that is was very easy to navigate so when a patient was admitted to our facility there was no digging through the last 12 months of patient follow-up visits to locate what they were last seen for, what medications they were prescribed, etc. Ease of use was certainly not the issue.