athenaOne Reviews

Pros

Athena is all that you need. We’ve been using it for 6 months and the way our patient care, efficiency and revenue increased, I don’t think we can go back to the old ways of doing things. We were trained for a month and after that things were so simple and easy. Managing patients had never been this simplistic. I recommend Athena to those who are looking for something that would improve their efficiency and revenue as well.

Cons

The only negative thing that I’ve noticed about Athena is that I am unable to view the patients E&M code history while I code the final billing slip. A suggestion that I’d like to make is that if Athena could add a claim tab, so that viewing claim history of patients while finishing the current billing slip would make things a lot more better and easier.

Pros

We know that nothing is perfect in this world, so how can a system be perfect, so you’ve got to look for something that is at least close to perfect. In this case Athena I would say is close to perfect. It is easy to schedule and send out messages. You need a bit of training before you start using it and the training is very helpful. It would take a bit of a time to get it but once done, it is quite simple and fast.

Cons

There are few things that kind of takes a lot of your time, that’s what I dislike most of this system. Like before filing things away you have to close a lot of tedious items and doing this is time taking.

Pros

The system is physician friendly, efficient and quality focused. This EMR has everything that you’d want, and you would love it as well. Easily adaptable. The online forum that is available is great and the community and support you get is wonderful. The system is simple, easy and intuitive. It is fun to use as well once you’re properly trained and get the hang of it.

Cons

No cons at all, just because of the product update things kind of seemed to get out of hands but once you get it, it’s all cool and amazing. I don’t want to go back to how it was before.

Pros

I can’t even imagine my life without Athena. It is such an easy and convenient EMR, that every other task has been easy to do. Their support team is superb, they’ll always help you, be it on call or submitting a case, they definitely get back to you and resolve your issues. I have never been given this much support from any other EMR before. I recommend using Athena.

Cons

There’s this one thing that I really don’t like, the information on claims sometimes tend to be incorrect, they need to look into this problem.

Pros

The system is pretty good and is intuitive as well. The training is given before making it live, but I am still in the process of learning it. The more I explore and use its different features and functionalities, the more I am liking how it works and does everything.

Cons

I believe that they can still improve a lot more if they work hard.

Pros

Athena is great and is easy to use once you’ve been trained to work on it. The billing and reporting feature is great, and that I don’t need to maintain a spreadsheet for all this. The forum is very helpful where you can add questions or issues and get your answers rather than having to call them.

Cons

I would really like if they could offer customization of the system and online forms according to the specialty practice, it is annoying when other specialty things pop up in the patient chart, and the online form also has a lot of irrelevant questions, so it would be better to be able to customize it according to the printed forms that we have, if possible.

Pros

It is easy to use, and I like the registration process and the way it is detailed. Patient care gets better with their portal which is accessible by patients as well. The communication between patient and provider becomes easy. It gives appointment reminders as well. More time is saved by using this.

Cons

Searching information can be troublesome. The system is very detailed and has a lot of features and functionalities but for someone running a small business consisting of 1 doctor, it isn’t suitable. It is mainly designed in a way that could cater multiple practitioners, so for me it wasn’t the best option.

Pros

The system is nice, you can get everything done with it. The layout is great and I really like how it is designed the pages and the drop-down menus. The product is quite detailed. I only use a small part of the system, and I can easily access all the patients and provider information which is amazing.

Cons

There is an excess of same information pages, and I have access to information that I shouldn’t be having access to, so they need to do something to verify things to be secured and sharing access related to tasks performed.

Pros

The software is easy to customize and has improved our workflows mainly because we can easily tweak the templates.

Cons

I cant think of any cons as the product works very well according to our needs.

Pros

It is simple and easy. The system is intuitive and usable. The training is always given prior going live. But we’re still learning the program everyday by using it. You just like it even more while using it. The patient portal is great, and the overall system is amazing. We are getting used to it day by day and how easy it has made things for us.

Cons

Before making the system live, one needs to make sure that everything that they require is properly set up. Otherwise it’s just a mess. We tried pushing the live date for one week but, yet it wasn’t ready. After setting it up and making it live we got to know that there were still many features that it was missing, and we had to revert things back. Athena should do a thorough practice test of the workflow before making it live.

Pros

It is simple and easy. You can do everything through the system like messaging, writing notes, prescribing etc. It’s a pretty good system.

Cons

Everything that you do, you need a bar code for it, otherwise it won’t be done, and having a bar code for everything really bugs you. Switching through pages is a mess, especially when you haven’t saved anything and want to switch, all the data entered would be lost.

Pros

It has been 2 months of using Athena and we’re still using it. It is simple and easy once you’re trained well. They do state a 6% increase in collections in all their advertisements which caught our eye to get it, and with no doubt I must say not only 6% our collections have gone 15% up from what it was last year, and I believe that it mostly is because of Athena. Athena is doing a good job.

Cons

The system kind of takes longer in processing than our previous system and is slightly unorganized. And I also feel that we are kind of bound to the system, because we have to do everything on it, but I guess that wouldn’t be a problem knowing that our collections are well handled.

Pros

The customer support team is great, they are prompt in responding and are super friendly as well. The ability to monitor performance is nice.

Cons

The settings of this system are not intuitive at all. The messaging system of Athena is completely unorganized, and is so messed up, that it often gets hard to get. The auto population feature is inconsistent and makes everything inefficient, due to which the search process gets longer and annoying.

Pros

The training that was given to us was very helpful and knowledgeable. The training is always given before you start using the system, which is nice, so that you could learn it all before. The system can be customized according to your requirements. Meaningful Use certification was easy to get.

Cons

Before you sign up, they make a lot of promises, but when it comes to the point of delivering their promises, that doesn’t happen. The system is full of glitches and there’s a lot of clicking you do before you can get something done. Getting connected with their support team is a horrible experience, make an appointment and so. Even after getting connected they would promise to fix things but we’ve yet not seen anything that has been fixed for us. It has been 4 months using Athena and billing is a mess. The embedded E&M coder isn’t reliable as well.

Pros

The platform combines EMR, billing and care management which helps me tackle PCMH, meaningful use and other complicated government or insurer requirements. Its first-pass billing and payments generally run smoothly and efficiently when there aren't mistakes. The pricing feels fair for the level of service offered.

Cons

I think the underlying code is a real mess. That poor foundation shows up as recurring glitches in the interface, frequent incompatibilities and sluggish performance. When I look at job boards or former employee comments, the same complaints keep popping up which tells me these are not isolated incidents. There are a lot of built-in features that in my view, increase the risk of human error and create real patient safety concerns and over the years I've watched the company refuse to truly acknowledge or remedy these problems.. To me this UI would be unacceptable in aviation and I believe healthcare should be just as safety-focused. Medication lists are a particularly frustrating example as they're hard to read, cluttered and don't clearly show what the patient was taking before the visit versus what has been started, stopped or changed during and after the encounter in any user-friendly way. I see this as one of the most dangerous parts of the product, though there are other safety-related shortcomings as well. When a refill request comes in, it requires clicking through multiple screens to find the medication history before I can responsibly refill which effectively encourages clinicians to skip that critical step. And if you do follow the proper workflow, you can feel like you're being penalized by the system for taking the time to do the right thing. The vendor's support area includes a so-called community where users can theoretically share tips and solutions but in practice it feels like an echo chamber, people who post repeated negative feedback reportedly get banned and if you don't accept their strict Terms of Use you can't even view or participate in that space to get help or learn about updates. After visits I'm spending roughly 10-12 minutes documenting per patient on average because I refuse to rely on boilerplate notes, I want to document care personally and accurately. I tried to get dictation through their partner Dragon which I believe would cut my documentation time to around a minute but despite my first request two months ago and several follow-ups (both through athenahealth and externally), I still haven't heard back. They also say that if you buy Dragon directly you won't get full interoperability with their system. Right now I have effectively zero interoperability which is a major problem. There are simply too many clicks everywhere. I even know another local provider who switched to a different EMR for these reasons. The patient portal is another sore point as patients can't upload images so they can't quickly show me a mole they're worried about, an incision site, a pill that looks different or a rash. Those are the kinds of simple, time-saving exchanges other EMRs support but athenahealth does not which creates extra work for patients and clinicians alike.

Pros

This is an all in one solution. It makes my practice feel like a resort, since I have billing, a communicator, my EMR and consistently truly amazing behind-the-scenes support that's always working hard for me!

Cons

I experience delays when having small details customized to my practice.

Pros

I find the platform extremely user-friendly and easy to use. Every system has its own quirks but whenever one pops up, the CSC team jumps on it and they genuinely know what they're doing and resolve issues quickly!

Cons

When it comes to the billing side, it can sometimes feel a little confusing especially since we do a lot of write-offs which complicates things. Still, I find the CSC helpful whenever I run into a roadblock.

Pros

I'm really impressed with the support team, they're phenomenal and the software itself is very smart. The reports and metrics I can pull with virtually no effort are exceptional. Seeing exactly how long patients spend moving through our different office departments and understanding how quickly providers document visits at the time of service has been eye-opening for me, to say the least.

Cons

Honestly, I felt that the setup training could be much more comprehensive than what we received.

Pros

There are automated elements that in theory reduce staff time.

Cons

The sales process was my biggest frustration. There wasn't any demo I could explore on my own to test and confirm the salesperson's promises before I signed and handed over a large, non refundable deposit. I discovered later that several crucial items I'd been told were part of the EHR and billing package simply weren't included. For example, the kiosk feature that would let me go genuinely paperless and the promised access to a certified coder were absent. What really surprised me was that the salesperson seemed to not even grasp the difference between a billing specialist and a certified coder which left me feeling misled and uneasy about what had been sold.

Pros

What I appreciate most about this product is its billing module. I find it efficient and the billing back-office team are competent. To me, it's obvious this system evolved from billing software instead of a clinical record. If your priority is revenue over patient care, you might pick it. Otherwise I'd recommend searching for alternatives elsewhere.

Cons

The medical-record side is very time-consuming and it's complicated. Filling out the electronic chart routinely adds around twenty extra minutes compared with the old paper chart. I strongly advise avoiding AthenaHealth's EMR.