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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Kareo Medical Billing
Score 5.1 out of 10
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Kareo Medical Billing provides billing solutions to medical
offices. It includes: Billing Best Practices, Specialty Expertise and Ongoing
Training & Support.
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.
In my experience, problems with them adding incorrect fees to pad their bills coupled with their unethical business practices such as locking you out from accessing your EMR at the drop of a hat prevent me from recommending Kareo to any practice. Reliability is paramount. Kareo's use of unethical business practices (locking you out from your EMR or disabling your EMR all together) can result in a physician being sanctioned by the medical board (inappropriate medical record keeping) or financially destroy a small practice leaving them with NO ACCESS to their ERAs/patient billing accounts etc leads me to NOT reccomend their products or doing business with them.
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.
Kareo stays up to date on insurance changes which allow for smooth transitions.
Kareo asks for feedback and has a place to go and request changes or additions that would make our job easier.
I love that you can submit a help ticket or call, if you prefer, with any questions or problems that you may have. They are always very prompt with their follow up.
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
I've spent hours on the phone discussing various issues with regards to data variance between two different source documents within the software. At one point, I could not reconcile the A/R balance on one of the dashboards to the A/R balance pulled from the Excel add-in. Unfortunately, their support teams were not able to help out with this.
The Excel add-in falls short in a few key areas. Specifically, they do not provide a simple method of joining data fields from the "charges," "payments," and "transactions" tables. One is left to attempt to join the data sets via VLOOKUP or INDEX(MATCH).
At times, we have had issues with the API providing information that would not tie out to figures reported elsewhere within the software. Unfortunately, their support teams were not able to help out with this.
During my medical rotations I have used multiple products similar to Centricity, but I found Centricity to be one of the easiest to use and one of the easiest systems to learn
We are much happier with Kareo than Compulink. The software as a service makes it easy to manage claims from multiple locations when I cannot be on site. The reports and all other aspects I have mentioned as distinct to Kareo. We had a very hard time tracking things with Compulink.
