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…
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Zuora
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
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.
If your company processes a large volume of transactions, Zuora is well-suited for you. In addition, if you need to make changes to subscriptions to your customers frequently or track usage in order to bill clients, Zuora has the capability to do so. If your company goes through any kind of audits, Zuora's audit log may come in handy. Zuora does cost quite a bit so if your company doesn't process a large volume of transactions or make many changes to subscriptions, it may not be worth the investment.
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.
Flexibility with the product catalog. Once you understand the product catalog and its capabilities, the possibilities are endless. You are able to spin up new products quickly and test new ideas with minimal development time.
API focus. Zuora API focus allows us to step away from the Zuora UI and build our own platform over the top of Zuora reducing ambiguity for our customers and team
Constant upgrades - Zuora is continually adding to its product and listening to its customers to build a product that is leading the way in the subscription economy
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
The user interface is a disaster. There are many things that make no sense, such as clicking on a hyperlinked Subscription number that takes you to an invoice instead of the subscription.
Extremely limited customization capability to improve poor UI
Searching/reporting is very weak and difficult to use. The format of exported data is at least different than what many other systems tend to use. I find it unintuitive and difficult to manipulate or perform tasks such as vlookups and filtering; perhaps it's really smart and I just don't get it
The concept of a credit memo does not exist...yet. They keep promising it but have not delivered. Their solution has been Invoice Adjustments and Invoice Item Adjustments, which at least don't make sense for my business.
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
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.
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
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.
Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.
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.
Positive impact: we're able to invoice our customers timely and correctly.
Positive impact: recurring payments are simple and accurate.
Negative impact: Zuora and the Customer Management System that my organization use are no longer integrated because of some issues in the past with double billing and things of that nature.
