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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WellSky Personal Care
Score 8.0 out of 10
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WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare) is an online home healthcare business administration platform. It includes features for scheduling in-home care visits, messaging between patients and caregivers, and marketing caregiving services.
I couldn't recommend IDX to anyone. Most of the reviews on this site appear to be for the program that broke off from Athena IDX, Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS). CPS is a much more capable program managed by Unlimited Systems (a separate company) that should NOT be confused with Athena IDX (managed by Athena Health). It's possible that Athena IDX was usable in the 90s compared to other peer programs at that time, but there are so, so many better, modern solutions available now for far less money. This software is priced at the enterprise level with a level of quality that is below budget tier with an ancient feature set to boot.
ClearCare/WellSky is not a software I would go out of my way to endorse. The coding bugs are numerous and fixing those bugs is not at all a priority. Unfortunately, it is still the most robust platform of it's kind - reporting, customization, integrations, automation capabilities, mobile app for caregivers - and with it becoming part of WellSky I am hopeful they will now have the resources to allocate for bug squishing
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.
Managing the scheduling process form the employee and client standpoint. In one screen we can see exactly what is going on with a client. Who's there, when they arrived, when they will be leaving, etc. Plus we can manage up to the minute changes in the care plan, in real time.
Payment processing allows us to bill and initiate client payments with a few clicks. It automatically reconciles accounts receivable. It handles both credit card and ACH payments. Saves a bunch of time.
Background checks are fast and easy because they are integrated into the platform. When a potential employee applies it starts the system begins all the steps in the hiring process. Once they get to orientation and have completed all of the other hiring process steps, with one click we initiate a customized background check that meets our licensing requirements.
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
ClearCare does experience times when the system glitches. You cannot add or edit shifts, see client or caregiver details, nothing. They don't have anything in place that reassures you that they are aware of the problem and are working to fix it. It doesn't usually happen more than a few times a year, but we rely so heavily on this software for the daily operation of our business that even 15 minutes down can prove to be catastrophic.
You can call tech support, but overall I have found them rather unhelpful. I don't usually stay on hold long enough to get a live person, preferring to send an email if it's not an urgent need. I have been disappointed with the time it takes to resolve issues; the longest I went without a fix was about 8 months. They are pretty slow to change when it's something that has been suggested by the network publically. Moreover, sometimes the changes they implement make things more difficult for us or require features or functionality that we would prefer not to use. For example, they are rolling out a new feature that will allow the caregivers to enter their own availability in the system. We require them to contact the office to change their availability or request time off and plan to do everything we can to keep it that way.
The mobile version of the administrative site is essentially the desktop version, but tiny. When we are out and about after hours, inevitably we use our cell phones to utilize the software. Any shift adjustments are tedious, as the pop-up box moves around whenever you edit a field. To be fair, I'm not sure that the time and energy it would take to redesign the mobile site would be worth it when we still get all the functionality of the full site, even if it is harder to maneuver.
I have used ClearCare for about a year now and have only experienced positive outcomes with the system. It has everything you need from simple note reminders to detailed medial information regarding your client. If anyone in the health field takes the time to view this software, they would be hooked.
They are reasonably responsive with simple questions, but when it comes to the software not functioning as expected, resolution is very slow. I had a situation where I would click "cancel" in a scheduling window and it would go ahead and make the change (i.e. I didn't realize a caregiver wasn't actually available or that it would create over time, so I would cancel out of that window to go reevaluate, but when it closed that window, the change would be made regardless). That took 8 months for them to resolve, during which time they released a number of relatively useless updates. Currently, I am waiting for them to fix Safe Mode, which is supposed to give us basic access to personnel and scheduling. A select few clients/caregivers actually show up in this system, rendering it largely useless. I have been waiting since late August without an update or resolution, it is currently mid-February. For software that touts safe mode, I would think they would make sure it's actually functional for all users. They have to advertise it in the network because the software goes down with some frequency, at least every few months.
Training consists of overly specific points with no general process considerations. Trainers will regularly go 'into the weeds' on pointless edge cases while the meat of the training still needs to be addressed.
Athena IDX is more reliable than other platforms. It rarely has latency challenges where it has to be intermittently shut down or updated. It is accessible on multiple devices and overall, easy to use and navigate.
This is a similar system that was created for organizational purposes for health businesses. Ortho2 is not as user friendly and takes much longer to learn the different ins and outs of the software system. I used it for over six years and still did not use all of the features in the system
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.
POSITIVE IMPACT: We can access almost any metric related to the business and build reports that allow us to set goals, identify potential issues, maintain oversight, and automate workflows with the report scheduling
NEGATIVE IMPACT: We've been dealing with the same software bugs for over 5 years now, they slow productivity, create room for user error, require workarounds to be created, you name it, just a lot of work to make the platform's shortcomings better since they refuse to do it for us
