athenaIDX is an on-premise or cloud-hosted enterprise RCM solution that helps health systems, hospitals, billing services, and large practices optimize financial performance and successfully adapt to healthcare payment reform. It is based on the Centricity medical practice and EMR software that was formerly owned and supported by GE Healthcare acquired by Veritas Capital in 2018, spun off into a new entity (Virence Health), and then rebranded as a product of athenahealth (also a Veritas…
N/A
Billtrust
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
The Billtrust suite of AR solutions helps make sense of customers' ever-expanding invoicing preferences, their growing use of digital payments, and AR teams' valuable time. Accelerating the order-to-cash cycle benefits both sides of the B2B transaction.
Athena is a well-suited electronic medical record system for those professionals that work in a medical center, hospital, clinic, and/or outpatient clinic that need to provide frequent and accurate documentation for insurance providers and all other members of the care team. It might be less appropriate for a small agency.
Billtrust would work best for an organization that has grown beyond the capacity for a few people in A/R to manage customer invoices, or A/P to manage vendor invoices. If your business system can create the files needed for automation with Billtrust, or can create payables from properly formatted data from Billtrust, then it's worth looking into what Billtrust can do for you. They are especially skilled in helping to convert paper-only customers to e-mail or online invoicing with dedicated "campaign" managers and reporting on e-invoice adoption rates to help you meet your goals.
One of the best things about Centricity is it is flexible. We are able to add a data point behind a term (CPS calls this an observation term) and track any data needed. These observation terms also allow us to pull information forward and display information needed to make a good decision or used to decrease errors. For example in our history forms given to the patients one of the questions is side of injury. This affected side displays on our EMR forms which helps providers and prevents mistakes.
CPS integrates with other programs. We are paperless and use DocuSign to send each patient their history, ROS and all new paperwork. This allows us to import the history into the forms and has saved us from adding extra staff (FTEs) to room and take history. The history form can be completed at home or in the waiting room. Each section has a observation term behind it and allows it to be placed into the note at the correct section. Since we have a fully integrated product we do not have to have another program to enter or transfer our charges from the EMR to the PM side of the program.
Our notes look great! We did a lot of customization which gave us the detail and look we wanted. It seems like a lot of work at first, but the outcome has so much efficacy. We increased our providers without having to increase our staffing and it is due to he efficiencies we gained by using the EMR.
One other note, Centricity is flexible but that means it is complicated. You can not have flexibility without it be complicated don't let that stop you the end results can be great.
The payment portal is of the highest security, giving our participating customers piece of mind.
By offering electronic methods of billing statement, and other documents, electronically (email, ebill, ebank presentations) we are able to save on printing an postage costs.
Always on the cusp of emerging technologies, and willing to share their experience, Billtrust offers webinars, Twitterviews, classes, and conferences to keep you in the know and ahead in your industry.
Billtrust has a crack customer service team that always responds promptly, and with through follow up. Even better yet, when you respond to a survey on their customer service, they will donate to charity - that shows a willingness to hear what their customers have to say.
If you ever think of an idea, Billtrust is accepting of considering its implementation and how it can be incorporated into their services and systems, making the growth of services organically functional.
Statements print only current open accounts, would be nice to print a total statement for patients so they can see if payments are split between open and closed/zeroed out accounts
UI - Billtrust could've had a better design and overall user interface. Everything worked, but at times it could be challenging to navigate to the feature you needed to use.
Internal Dashboard - The internal dashboard was outdated and hard to navigate at times. The data produced by the dashboard was congested and didn't provide the most efficient view for gathering certain customer information.
We have a longstanding good record of invoice delivery and a high number of customers who are accustomed to the look and feel for logging to make payments
After 15 years I have only had a handful of support cases each year. When I have created support cases for issues the response time is under 24 hours. And the initial response is typically enough for me to close the case. I do not remember a case that needed to be escalated. For cases I opened to request changes (subject line, logo, etc.) the case is typically resolved within 7 days, and always includes examples for me to verify before the change is put into production. There are not typically any issues with Billtrust itself - my support cases typically involve issues that we caused with bad data, or requests for information we do not have access to through any of the existing reports.
Training consists of overly specific points with no general process considerations. Trainers will regularly go 'into the weeds' on pointless edge cases while the meat of the training still needs to be addressed.
Athena IDX is more expensive, has less features, is less modern, interfaces with our modern systems poorly and has actively created more manual work across the company. Each of the systems above are better in every conceivable way compared to this program.
For a less tech-educated workforce, Billtrust did the job and required minimal developer resources on our end. Also, while Billtrust lacked in several arenas relative to Stripe, it was good for us since we were not a subscription-based business. For the price, Billtrust was a good solution for our invoice-to-pay business.
Extremely expensive software for the limited feature set. We're talking millions of dollars with off hours support (anything outside of 8-6EST) that starts at $1200 for the first hour and $300 for each hour afterwards.
Multitasking isn't a thing unless you assign more licenses (thereby increasing your costs). Users can quite literally only have one IDX window open at a time unless you assign more licenses. This slows down everyone as there are plenty of times where examining different parts of a patient's profile is useful.
Reporting has been nearly impossible as we use modern reporting software. IDX's analytics site is firmly stuck in the 1990s and lacks decades of innovation present in something like Power BI.
Nickel and diming philosophy. A limited API server costs ~$10k/month. Setting up a new facility in IDX costs you and requires a 4 month lead time. Many more instances of this.
We are currently using it to reconcile two large vendor accounts.
We have been making electronic payments through our p-card for the past several months - allowing us to earn rebates of 1.17 - 1.25% on the payments made.
The downside is. The data isn't that clean, and we have spent hours and hours trying to get to the real number we owe to these vendors.
