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athenaIDX

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21 Reviews and Ratings

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What is athenaIDX?

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 company) in July 2020. EMR functionality is being dropped in favor of focusing on revenue cycle management, and interoperability with other EMR software.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about athenaIDX.
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Loving Ceridian Dayforce

Incentivized
Caitlynn SmartView profile
Training Development Specialist at MHC Healthcare (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization utilizes athenaIDX aka Centricity for our Medical, Behavioral Health, and OBGYN departments, and hope to soon move our Dental team into Athena. This platform allows our clinicians to electronically prescribe with ease, forms usage helps keep everyone on point.

Pros

  • Scheduling, easy to use and lots of customization.
  • Registration, easy and straight to the point.
  • Chart feature is a lot to look at until you get to know the system, once you know where to find things it doesn't seem hard or overwhelming to use.

Cons

  • Medication management was way better before the last update to an outside source. We have had nothing but issues.
  • Easy way to schedule recurring appointments. The current way takes a lot longer than people would like.

Most Important Features

  • Function.
  • Reporting.

Return on Investment

  • Medication Management has taken a negative impact on our clinicians, the ease of use changed into a complicated process.

Other Software Used

Cornerstone Practice Management Software, Ceridian Dayforce, Canva

AVOID: Decades out of date, nickel and diming and more manual work.

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Athena IDX as our source of truth for patient demographics. This is a mistake, as their system is built on the antiquated software that is incapable of handling lower cased letters as well as spaces after commas or anything that has been standard per the US Postal Service for the past two centuries or so (EX: 123 Anywhere Lane, Townsville NY 12345 isn't possible because their system cannot handle lower case letters, spaces after commas, etc. due to the archaic language that it's built upon (MUMPS, first developed in 1966, last updated in 1995).

Pros

  • The program is aesthetically acceptable

Cons

  • Cannot scale. This system was originally built for use within a hospital mainframe and has limitations baked in as a result. Modern reporting is nearly impossible due to the nonsensical data structure required by the ancient (by computer standards) 1970s era bones of the backend. This is uniform throughout the system.
  • Must have technical staff versed in what's essentially a dead programming language, MUMPS (created in 1966 and last updated in 1995), to make meaningful changes to customization. Permissions are extremely granular with no way to make changes across multiple permissions. Meaning if a person cannot see an item on a dropdown menu, or if a new dropdown menu is added, it then has to be added manually to every single other permission that you'd like that menu to appear in. This is naturally a big opportunity for errors to occur and is also a problem that has been solved in even 1990s era software.
  • Support is lacking and setup staff don't put effort into making sure that the system is set up in a way that makes sense. Staff are happy to present entry tables with duplicate fields, fields that will give an error that gives no information as to what needs to change for the error to go away (quite literally '???'), fields that are laid out nonsensically. Example: The USPS address format: address, city, state, zip? No, they'll be scattered across the fields with city and state somehow combined into one field. Staff will present this to you as normal and how things should be structured despite two centuries of USPS address structuring precedent.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Centricity Clinical Archive, Unlimited Financials, Epic, CareCloud and Dentrix

Centricity EMR is a system that you can gain efficiencies with.

Incentivized
Debi MitchellView profile
Administrator in Professional Services at Children's Orthopaedics & Scoliosis Surgery Associates, LLP (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Making the forms easier to create. Right now we have to pay someone to create a new form for us.
  • In the EMR they have spell check but you have to go back and correct in the form the mistake happened in. Having spell check be in a final review and allow correction in the review would be nice.

Return on Investment

  • We have increased the number of providers without increasing staff because of the efficiencies we have seen on the system.

Easy and accessible

Incentivized
Verified User
Supervisor in Professional Services (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this service primarily for documentation and billing. We also use this service to upload forms, documents, and any other relevant paperwork and documentation to the patient and family’s case. It is accessible by all members of the care team and can be easy to navigate through to find what you are looking for.

Pros

  • User friendly
  • Document uploading
  • Navigation

Cons

  • Less categories
  • Ease of developing templates
  • Log in process

Most Important Features

  • Documentation
  • Billing
  • Accessibility

Return on Investment

  • Quick to bill
  • Easy documentation
  • Simplified templates

Alternatives Considered

CentralReach

Other Software Used

CentralReach, ADP Workforce Now, AwsQuality Salesforce Services

Centricity helps ortho clinic with its flexibility

Incentivized
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Corporate (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Unique Schedule Templates
  • Unique Appointment Types
  • Good selection of standard reports

Cons

  • 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
  • Ability to create custom reports

Most Important Features

  • Customizable
  • Flexibility
  • Cost

Return on Investment

  • We are able to have a customized product for a reasonable price

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

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