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Topic starter
Good morning,
I'm looking for feedback from sites that have enabled the Dr. First Med Management in v20 (preferably athenaFLOW) already. Our organization is slated to enable in late July and are developing our plan now. We have a smidge over 275 prescribers so it's a little daunting.
1. How much have the new workflows impacted provider/staff efficiency?
2. Is there anything you wish you knew prior to enabling that would have improved the process?
3. How valuable were athena's professional resources in the process?
4. Any other feedback/lessons learned that you can offer.
Thanks in advance!
Posted : April 28, 2021 2:44 am
We are slated to go live with our first Hospital May 12, Second Hospital June 17. Currently we are utilizing the Athena Webex's to send out to all staff to prepare. Hopefully someone has already done this as I am eager to hear these answers as well.
Posted : April 28, 2021 2:48 am
That would be helpful for our organization as well. Thanks for asking the question.
Posted : April 28, 2021 3:15 am
Following -- We are slated to go live with V20 Medication Management on June 17, 2021. We will be requiring staff to review all CBTs before go live. We are also designating super users for each site (14+ sites) to be available to help with transition. I would also be interested in hearing from sites who have already gone live with any successful training workflows and what wished they should have done. Thanks !
Posted : April 29, 2021 1:53 am
Topic starter
Good luck! What do you mean by CBT?
Posted : April 29, 2021 1:57 am
CBT- computer based training. Athenahealth has provided multiple recorded training videos that you can access to review without needing a logon to athenahealth portal. They are available on the athenahealth portal
Posted : April 29, 2021 3:34 am
Topic starter
Thank you. I have so many acronyms floating around in my head that I lose track!
Posted : April 29, 2021 3:39 am
1. How much have the new workflows impacted provider/staff efficiency?
Tremendously
2. Is there anything you wish you knew prior to enabling that would have improved the process?
Watching the videos is a must but it is hard to know everything when you have nothing to practice on while watching the video's until it is live. The other problems are not something you can fix currently either way. There is a printing issue when they are printed it cuts off the left side of the page unless you Print PDF and then print. Also if you are renewing a medication in a chart that has a popup flag you have to close medication management close the popup and reopen the document and you only get one pharmacy that populates over into the patients pharmacy list.
3. How valuable were athena’s professional resources in the process?
We use Quatris Healthco and they did a wonderful job for our upgrade.. However the other problems listed will need to be fixed by Athena and Dr. First
4. Any other feedback/lessons learned that you can offer.
Make sure that when you have provider delegates you add anyone in the practice that could fill the providers prescriptions or they will not be allowed.
Posted : June 2, 2021 10:17 am
We activated on June 3rd. We have 9 locations.
To prepare our providers and staff, we began emailing the Athena CBT's out in February as a prereq for our onsite training.
We did 20, 1.5 hour training sessions in 17 days beginning 3 and 1/2 weeks before activation and then a 3 hour Superuser Training Session with the Office Managers the day prior to activation. Since everything in MM is role driven, we created a test user for each role so that we could show what they would see.
We reviewed via PowerPoint and discussed the items that we could not show in the test environment with full explanation of what MM is and why the change and referred to the video and MM guide that they should reference.
We went over in every training session the process of enrollment for patients.
We printed the guides to provide at training. We also created an FAQ sheet.
This is a HUGE change for the providers and staff. Any training that you can provide will be extremely beneficial.
1. If you have received access to your production URL prior to activation- make sure to take screen shots of your preferences
2. If you have custom med lists now- make sure to create in your prod as favorites- Favorites will be a huge time saver.
3. Go through your processes to show the quickest way to do a new prescription vs renewal
4. Make sure that you have your agents assigned to the providers
5. Make sure to review the medication section where the prescriptions are prepped to understand all areas that need to be filled in for a renewal.
6. Make sure that they all understand the difference in the fact that they are launching MM in the cloud- all signing happens in med management. If they have scripts that are waiting to be signed and they go out and try to end their note and sign it, MM will keep launching until they sign the scripts.
The meds that are difficult to do are insulin and tapered meds. Get a flow down for that. Build favorites.
Look at the Athena Idea Zone on the Community Athena Portal. Customers post there about MM.
Posted : June 8, 2021 5:14 am
We went live on Medication Management this past Friday 7/30/21. Although we are only a few days in, I wanted to go ahead and reply to this post with the hope that it will help someone else. We have 23 providers in three locations. So far, we have not encountered many of the problems faced by other practices with sync errors, connections, slowness etc. We had one sync error that was resolved by Quatris within a few days.
1. Our clinical staff has done well with the workflow changes even though they are not necessarily happy with them. I think the key to this is proper training and setting expectations. I provided one-on-one training and gave them time to practice in a test environment (which is a must-have). MM is definitely more clicks and is much more information, so efficiency has decreased slightly but I think this will improve as users become more familiar.
2. No, I feel we were as prepared as possible. We had an excellent project manager (Amanda Wireman at Quatris) and she walked us through every step.
3. The Athena resources were somewhat helpful, although I think getting users into the test system is the best and most efficient way for them to learn. We uploaded the training videos to our training system (MedTrainer) and assigned them to every user, including providers. Doing this allowed us to track who completed training and who did not. We also uploaded the training documents to our public drive for everyone to reference.
4. Now for a few of the negatives
The unmatched patients are a total pain to process for our non-clinical staff. There is no filtering mechanism, you can't filter by matched vs. unmatched, causing you to have to scroll through every matched rx renewal to get to the unmatched which is tedious when you have 100s of refill requests daily. If you have an unmatched patient that is not actually your patient, there is nothing you can do with it. You can't remove it. It only falls off the list after 90 days which adds to the long list mentioned above.
When you are in MM, you can't access anything in the chart (OV notes etc.). You have to exit MM, look in the chart and then go back to MM. You may have to do this several times if you are forgetful like me.
Medication refills no longer translate to the office visit note.
SmartSig makes inappropriate changes to instructions. Users need to pay close attention to the translations and make corrections as needed.
We were hopeful for the prior authorization feature but it does not work as well as expected.
Posted : August 3, 2021 3:17 am
