athenaOne Reviews

Pros

My favorite thing is that I can write directly on the computer, sign documents and send them off without ever needing to print anything out.

Cons

I find it really difficult for getting through a chart. There are just too many clicks and I have to write things down just to verify and compliment the chart.

Pros

The templates make it easy to describe the history of present illness. They're good for that but sometimes they don't include every possible scenario I need.

Cons

Some things just don't make sense. The BOXES! It creates tasks for you to do later, sends them to your staff, who then send them back to you and it's just a lot of back and forth. It's not efficient at all.

Pros

It helps me create notes really efficiently with templates and macros. Refilling prescriptions is easy too, once you figure out which ones need to be refilled.

Cons

Their billing and practice management service is terrible! I'm paying them a fortune and they're doing nothing. All the work just gets sent back to my biller. The biggest problems with the EMR itself are that it's hard to see when a prescription was last refilled, you have to search all over for messages and there are way too many steps for simple tasks.

Pros

This software is very user-friendly. We use it in our clinic, emergency department and inpatient areas with no problems. There's definitely a learning curve but once your staff gets it, there's no going back. Within 60 days of switching, our hospital revenue went up by 11%. Their customer service is amazingn& our account manager is here every month and calls us weekly. I never got that level of service from Epic, CPSI or Meditech!

Cons

I wish they had more people in their customer service center. This company is growing really fast and having a few extra hands to help answer questions would be a huge help.

Pros

It has a patient portal and I really like the saved findings and saved phrases features. It also interfaces with some of our labs.

Cons

Orders that get faxed to us go into a queue and you can't access them in real time. It's too easy to accidentally scan a document to the wrong patient. Getting help on the phone isn't convenient for a busy office. Other EMRs have better support. But my biggest gripes are having to pick a diagnosis instead of an ICD-10 code, not being able to link medications to multiple diagnoses, the way medication reviews work and how hard it is to review historical documents or amend notes.

Pros

I like that it tells you what quality measures you need to meet. I also like that you can take a photo of something for the chart and upload it straight from your smartphone but that's about all the positive things I have to say.

Cons

Faxing back and forth with our nursing homes is a joke. It takes almost 10 steps for every single fax. When we do labs in-house, we enter the lab, complete it, save it, and close it, then an hour later it's back in a "bucket" to be closed again. When I complain about all these steps, they tell me it's a "checks and balances system." Everything we need to do in our office has three or four extra steps compared to our old system. They promised to handle all our billing... well, that's a joke too. They only bill for the obvious things and then write off everything else. We're losing money every single day because of this. There is honestly not one thing I like about this software. I've told people that the next time I'm job hunting, if they tell me they use Athena, I'm walking out. I never want to deal with this company again.

Pros

I love that it combines billing, EHR and practice management tools. They charge a percentage of our revenue, so if we don't get paid, they don't get paid that feels fair. It's a really flexible system with so many options for expanding and customizing. Plus the customer service is excellent.

Cons

There's actually very little I dislike. But when a problem needs their "Rules" team, it can take weeks to fix. For example, when our state Medicaid changed their claim format, it was a real problem that it took Athena weeks to get compliant.

Pros

It's easy to use and can be set up the way our practice likes it. The support from Athena is great, they really do what they can to help with our individual needs.

Cons

When we scan information in, it can be really difficult to find specific things later. Also the pricing is a bit much.

Pros

For my new small practice, it has multiple features that let me run with a lean staff because of all the automation. I love the connectivity through the online portal and being able to upload new patient paperwork and it saves a ton of time.

Cons

It's like any new system with a lot of features and it just takes some time to figure out. We're still adjusting and editing things to make it work for our specific specialty and practice.

Pros

I really like its code searching feature.

Cons

I have too many complaints to list. Here's the short version: their customer service is poor, the system can't be customized for our practice's needs, their reps drop claims before our internal team can scrub them, payments get posted wrong and they adjust patient balances incorrectly.

Pros

I can pull the assessment and plans from previous notes into the current one. It seriously cuts down on my documentation time.

Cons

I was told Athena handles the billing and makes sure claims are clean before they're sent out. That's not true at all. Athena doesn't really "do" billing; they just act as a clearinghouse and do posting. They sometimes even change things on claims incorrectly, like the place of service which causes rejections. I was also told I was ready to go live, only to find out that alot insurance info and provider NPI numbers were entered wrong which held up claims for months. On top of that, I was told they had pediatric templates following Bright Futures guidelines. Those didn't exist. Our pediatrician had to build every template from scratch. Now my patient visits take longer, I've had to hire a biller and a scribe to handle the extra work and Athena never compensated me for the revenue I lost while they were holding up my claims with their mistakes.

Pros

It's a single, unified system that does everything. It's very all-encompassing and works well for a broad number of specialties, not just primary care.

Cons

It tries to do way too much and has gotten way too complicated. Because of that whenever you need help with almost anything, you have to create a case and wait. I found this super frustrating when trying to fix accounts receivable issues like unposted payments, especially since Athena takes a percentage of our revenue and is supposed to be our partner in this. I saw very little evidence of their billing team actually doing anything on the front end to help.

Pros

The electronic scanning and faxing is genius! It handles so much electronically that it actually helped us trim down our staff.

Cons

The billing is just okay. My biggest issue was that claims would sometimes get stuck in "Athena Hold," and I wouldn't even know they were there until it was too late to file them. After a bunch of phone calls, Athena could never give me a good reason why they weren't sent. They also just write charges off after a while which isn't good. The patient charge screens are really hard to understand and when Athena's team works a claim, they're no help. They just leave pointless notes and don't fix the problem. It takes our billing lady one phone call to get it sorted.

Pros

It is much faster than others we've used. The templates load super quickly which saves me a ton of time.

Cons

First round of collections is automated by Athena. A lot of the time, the notes they put on the accounts don't match what's in the patient's chart. For example, they'll say "referral needed" when the referral is already right there. It might be because we're still new to the system but it's a major problem for us right now.

Pros

The EMR system is okay but it's definitely not superior to its competitors, including some of the free EMRs that are out there.

Cons

It's not simple at all. When I was learning it, I had to call customer support for everything. I even had to call just to double-check that I had done things right because I learned early on that even if it�looked�right, it often wasn't. I was either in the wrong "area" or I missed some unnecessary second step. There are also several places where you can leave notes that look like they're for Athena staff but nope! Those notes just sit there for you to look at. If you actually want Athena to do something, you have to call them (and you'll probably get a support center in India, just so you know).

Pros

I really like that a lot of the collections process is automated. It provides a much faster follow-up for initial claim rejections.

Cons

Setup process feels so tedious and the first group of collectors that Athena provides doesn't seem to be trained very well.

Pros

I really like the billing system, as the claims can be scrubbed before submitting to the insurance. The product is easy to navigate and saves a lot of time

Cons

Athenas team manages our denials and I feel they are not doing a good job. We have to correct their mistakes and feel that we should take this service from them.

Pros

The sales person was the reason why we bought this system. Nothing that we were shown is operational in the system at this point.

Cons

It is extremely hard to work on. Make sure they offer you a trial before you decide to invest even a single dollar in this company

Pros

I like the practice management component of the product and the software really helps us improve the collection

Cons

The doctors hate the product and feel there are too many options and clicks. They feel the product can be improved and are always complaining about the product

Pros

The product is easy to use and allow us to easily access some of the key components like scheduling and labs on the go.

Cons

There are some issues when it comes to printing and system at times are slow