athenaOne vs AdvancedMD EHR: Which is a better fit?

Katie: My name is Katie. I am the office director at Behavioral Health Clinic. We are about 20 staffs and my rating for athenaOne, the EHR/EMR system, is a five. Before the owner psychiatrist bridged off to start his own clinic and use athenaOne, we used a system at our old clinic. I don't know remember the name. It was from 1997, and it was F1s, F11s, F12s, and it was very, very old school, not a lot of information, and definitely needed an update. The owner and medical director psychiatrist chose athenaOne. Once he chose the system to use, I was the one that helped onboard and set up the entire system for scheduling, credentialing, insurance payers, adding schedules, doing all the portal settings, et cetera, like that. So I'm assuming he chose the platform, because it is such a nice interface and everything flows really well. To get started with athenaOne, it was actually pretty easy on certain platform systems for different departments, such as scheduling, setting up schedules, transferring patients. I know we had a little blip with the adding the insurance payers and the credentialing portion based off the account manager were provided. Granted, we were also in the middle of COVID, July 2020, so the blip was on both sides, but it was pretty easy after a couple months of what we got used to. And then once in-house staff used athena more often, we got used to all the settings, and we were able to internally figure out and troubleshoot with one another. The advice I would give for any company or clinic that is considering using athenaOne, I would give them that everything is all accessible inside athenaOne. You have scheduling. You have insurance verifications. You have portal messages. You have reports you can run. You can send out automatic email campaigns to patients. You can customize that even, so it's not going to all patients, it can only go to certain patients of the day. Here in Minnesota, we have snowstorms, so if patients are coming in the afternoon, we can set a little blip to be sent out to all the patients in the afternoon that we are closing early because of all the snow coming. And now, we don't have to manually sit and call every single patient, so it's all beautifully laid out in each tab in interface.

Alexandra: My name is Alexandra, and I am the owner of Halcyon Bill Co in Las Vegas, Nevada. We work with a broad range of specialties nationally for medical billing and medical consulting services. I give AdvancedMD EHR five out of five. Prior to using AdvancedMD EHR, we were using Kareo EHR as well as Practice Fusion. The major issues with both of those EHRs for our clients was their lack of ability to be flexible when it came to the needs of the practices. For example, customizable note templates or something that is really important to practices and both of those EHRs struggle to provide that. They also lacked some sophistication when it came to integrations and even support in setting them up. I recommend AdvancedMD EHR to my clients based on its extreme flexibility and being able to customize to the practices needs. Everything from scheduling to prescription management to note templates, making it a seamless process both for patients and the practice as well. Getting started with AdvancedMD EHR definitely has a learning curve. Because it is so customizable, there's a lot to learn. There's a lot of features that need to be understood by both the practice, clinical staff as well as the administrative staff. But once those learning curves are overcome, the software is fantastic. My advice for practices looking to get onto AdvancedMD EHR is to work with an administrator that has experience on the software. It will make the learning curve a little bit easier, and also give the practice an idea of how the system should be configured based on their needs. Also, making sure that you're taking full advantage of the training time and working with your trainer beforehand to make sure that you have a good roadmap of where you're starting, where you're ending, and what are the most important features for your practice.