Kristi,
I'm going to answer your question the best I can, but also use it to get something off my chest. I apologize in advance for my cathartic ramblings.
Experience with Athena One: No direct experience, but several of our staff members came from a practice that used it. They all hated it, but admittedly, their evaluation was coming from the administrative side (i.e. practice management functions like scheduling, billing, etc.). Athena was built from the ground up to run in the cloud and their business model was focused on getting medical practices to outsource their billing and revenue recovery functions to them. Their marketing leaned heavily on their ability to detect claims that would likely get rejected and their "rules engine" which could magically prevent this from happening. Their EMR seemed to appeal to practices that either didn't have a strong back-office or had no interest in building/maintaining one. While their "rules engine" was touted as revolutionary (this was more sales speak than reality), it could not compete with a well-managed back-office. As far as an EMR, I suspect it captures the basic elements of a progress note via a lot of pointing and clicking and the level of customization would not be anywhere near what you can get out of Centricity. I personally have experience with a multitude of EMR systems and they all pretty much have their pros and cons, but the level of customization/configuration you can do with a cloud-based EMR will generally be significantly less than what you could achieve in Centricity's client/server system. Just to be clear, I recognize the move to the cloud is inevitable for all EMR systems, and any business application for that matter - so anyone reading this shouldn't put me in a box labeled ("fears change", "tech dinosaur", "boomer", etc.) - more on that later...
Does it work with VFE: Unfortunately, no. While Athena One may have some "configuration tools", Athena One and Athena Practice (Centricity) are two completely separate products, and VFE was actually developed by a third-party company to make some pretty sophisticated customizations (relatively speaking) accessible to a non-computer programmer. Again, the level of configurability and extensibility you will be able to achieve in Athena One will pale in comparison...that is, until Athena One provides a robust API (application programming interface) that is made accessible to end users.
Do the upgrades work as easily as stated?: Not sure what information you have read/heard, but since Athena One is a cloud-based application, upgrades are generally handled by the service provider...so yes, they should be easier on the end user. This is a god-send to anyone in IT that normally has to perform the upgrades, but also a huge curse, because you literally will have no control over the deployment of new features, AND you will have to rely almost 100% on the vendors support options. Translation: expect unhappy physicians and users that are used to in-house IT, because big VARs and parent EMR company support channels will never be able to respond as quickly and thoroughly as a strong internal team.
<begin rant>
Herein lies the issue I have with Athena Health, and for that matter, pretty much any private equity group that purchases healthcare IT vendors. I personally feel that Athena Health is not as transparent as they ought to be with their roadmap and long term strategy; not to mention their lack of customer engagement (and don't blame COVID). I've attended several of their townhalls and was at the infamous CHUG conference in 2018 when the rumors started flying about a PE purchase of Centricity. I won't go into it, but let's just say it was very poorly handled and communicated. I'm sure anyone who was there would agree if you were to ask them. No matter how many times we are told that two products will continue to be supported (in our case Athena One and Athena Practice), I can almost assure you that their end game is to get everyone on one product. To do otherwise simply wouldn't make sense to the private equity group; the PE's MO will always be to get a decent ROI within a reasonable timeframe. Maintaining two separate products, two different cultures, two different development teams, two different sales and support channels, and on and on, is just too costly. The PE firm went after Centricity and Athena likely because of the number of customers/subscribers and the potential ROI they would generate (internally or by selling to another PE firm down the road) if they could consolidate all the users on one platform. Like it or not, that's how this game is played. Predictably, the social engineering tactics have begun, and they will continue until Athena can safely announce that Athena Practice (Centricity) will no longer be supported as of (insert some date here that is only known by the private equity stakeholders). If I had to guess, I would say this will occur around the 2023 -2024 timeframe. I certainly understand why one might hold things close to the vest; fearing a mass exodus if the word ever got out. I would just argue that that "fear" is unfounded. Perhaps some customers would leave, but probably not as many as one might think, and certainly not as many if Athena did a much better job of engaging their customers in the design/development/transition process. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not upset about the move to the cloud or the innevitable changes coming down the pike; I'm all for progress, especially in an industry that is in desperate need of transformation. Deflecting or recasting the "tough" questions only exacerbates the frustration we all feel, but that's exactly what you get from Athena Health, which is no different from any other PE firm I've had the "pleasure" of dealing with :).
<end rant>
My only advice would be that if you or anyone is seriously considering transitioning from Centricity to Athena One, do yourself a favor and look at other cloud-based EMRs as well. Don't think for a minute that just because the two products are held by the same company that somehow that will magically make the transition less difficult.
Cheers and good luck,
Greg
Posted : March 3, 2021 8:33 am
