FIRSTHEALTH FAMILY CARE CENTERS SELECT ATHENAHEALTH’S WEB-BASED EMR SERVICE FOR IMPROVED CLINICAL WORKFLOW
PINEHURST, NC and WATERTOWN, MA (May 21, 2007) – athenahealth, Inc., a leading provider of web-based services, knowledge, and software for medical practices, today announced at the TEPR 2007 Conference and Exhibition, in Dallas, TX, that FirstHealth Family Care Centers have selected athenahealth’s fully-hosted, web-based EMR service, athenaClinicalsSM, to improve the clinical workflow and financial performance of their 7 care facilities throughout North Carolina.
“As market dynamics change for our medical practices, we want to empower our practices with services that will allow them to optimize operational efficiency while also achieving a higher level of clinical connectivity among our various locations,” said Dr. George D. Bussey, Chief Medical Officer of FirstHealth of the Carolinas. “We have used athenahealth’s practice management service since April 2003 and feel that their centrally-hosted EMR service will now allow our practices to achieve a greater level of interoperability both clinically and administratively. This will become increasingly important as medical groups look to implement new care processes while driving additional revenue from more efficient billing and pay-for-performance compliance.”
Leveraging athenaClinicals, the FirstHealth Family Care Centers will now be able to document all patient visits and procedures, submit orders and manage tasks in a single, secure online patient record hosted by athenahealth. As part of the “Virtual Clinical Back Office” service, athenahealth teams will receive all faxes for the practice, scan relevant clinical data directly into the patient record and automatically place the data into the practice’s clinical workflow. athenaClinicals will also submit all lab requests on behalf of the practices, provide electronic verification that all tests results have been received and make communication of abnormal results to the patient a new task in the clinical workflow, which may help to minimize professional liability.
“We are thrilled that one of North Carolina’s leading medical groups has selected our integrated clinical and practice management service offering,” said Todd Park, Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer of athenahealth. “We designed our services to provide a consistent and measurable return-on-investment and greater level of transparency into all facets of medical practices, which is specifically critical for a multi-facility organization like FirstHealth Family Care Centers.”
athenaClincals is fully-integrated with athenahealth’s practice management service, athenaCollectorSM. The combined service is designed to provide continually updated payer-specific coding rules and E & M coding reviews to help providers optimize reimbursement for practice-specific pay-for-performance payer contracts. All areas of the practices are able to share clinical and billing history information for patients, and monitor performance on best practice metrics which are automatically tracked and reported in athenaNet®, athenahealth’s web-based, fully-hosted software platform.
Source: athenahealth
