athenaOne vs Sign In Scheduling: 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.

Jane: My name is Jane. I have a small company of less than 10 employees and I give Sign In Scheduling a rating of three out of five. So we were looking at Sign In Scheduling when we were looking to kind of move our processes and to kind of enhance the productivity of the team. We were looking at products such as 10to8, and Schier Scheduling, and Calendly. And ultimately, there are some really useful points about this. You don't have to set it up too much. It's easier for individuals to kind of use and there are some kind of great integrations with it. But ultimately, we went for a product which was already built into a CRM system to kind of allow for continuity. With using elements such as Sign In Schedule, or the elements I liked about Sign In Schedule were the automatic reminders, and the messages that are sent, and also that it would take some payment details as well. And you would have less contact with your providers. It'll not be your providers with your clients. So you'd have less going back and forth all the time about what dates, and times, and stuff like that. And you can have multiple people on the system. And also, there's a two-way syncing feature with most calendar appointments. So setting it up was pretty simple. It's pretty intuitive, and it copies a lot of the look and feel of most of the calendar and booking systems such as, it made me feel like it was kind of a part of the Gmail system. And I liked the fact that you could see the calendar or the overall of what was going on with everybody. The problems started where it came to trying to set up integrations and things such as Zapya, because costs that weren't made clear at the beginning started to appear. And as you were going through the process, you were adding more and more costs in, in order to perform something that was advertised as low cost or no cost, which kind of made the time that we'd spent on it wasted, because we had to go back and reassess it when that information should have been available at the start. And you would find that it would reset the settings that you had for things like messages and for emails to go out, which meant that you had to constantly check on it and you couldn't rely on elements such as that. They were the main ones for me. I would really think about what it is that you want, where you are now, IE at the moment, could you use the free version of it, but what will happen in a year's time? Or do you need other integrations and services? And really look at how much that costing will be. And also look at the type of service that you want to provide for your client, and whether or not you can do that without the expense exceeding your budget. And I would certainly be kind of getting all of that cost information and that user experience information at the very beginning, and really thinking about it rather than halfway down the process, which was a learning experience for me.