Athena for Surgery Centers, not a good choice.
October 10, 2018

Athena for Surgery Centers, not a good choice.

Dale Bowman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with athenaClinicals

Pros

  • Athena is able to create a medication list from the patient's pharmacy purchase history. This aides in compiling a comprehensive list quickly, especially when the patients do not know what meds they are on. The downside to this module is that every time that you add a medication that is not on the list, it turns it into an order that the provider needs to sign. There are many times that you need to make an addition, that the provider does not want to sign as an order.
  • The patient history module is easy to configure to meet the needs of the organization.

Cons

  • There are many areas where Athena can improve. The support for surgery centers is non-existent. I was told that 2017 was going to be the year of the surgery center with opportunities to improve the system for that application. This never happened and the team that was supposed to assist me was disbanded.
  • The list of prior surgeries is cumbersome and difficult to use unless you happen to know the CPT code for the procedure. We end up choosing the closest procedure that we can find and making a note to clarify what we are listing.
  • The medication administration module is hard coded and cannot be changed. There are options that are absolutely ridiculous but we are told that they must stay that way. For example, an IV fluid rate is set at ml per minute rather than the standard of ml per hour. IV start sites are anything from the hand to rectal. When you give a medication it assumes that you are doing so based on a verbal order and requires that you document the verbal order. We give meds based on written orders almost all the time.
For a surgery center application, it is much better to use a system that is uniquely designed for surgery centers. Using Athena as a less than desirable work around has been a frustrating experience.
For a clinic setting I would rate the system much higher as that is the application that the program was designed to work for. The flow of the system works for a clinic but is cumbersome to use in a surgery center setting. We agreed to use this system because the clinics in our company used the system. It was helpful to have the ability to pull information from the clinic setting to the surgery center. When our clinics closed and only the surgery center continued to use the system, that value was gone.

athenaClinicals Feature Ratings

6.8
Real-time eligibility verification
10
Claims management
7
Patient billing
7
Financial Reporting
3
6.6
Rule-based scheduling
5
Automated patient check-in
7
Automated appointment reminders
7
Multi-location support
7
Calendar interface
7
Medical Inventory Management ()
Not Rated
7.2
Charting / document management
7
Templates
7
E-prescribing
10
Fax integration
10
Patient portal
10
Mobile/tablet support
5
Integration with other EMR and PM systems
5
Customization
4
Workflow automation
7
7.8
Role-based permission levels
10
Data backups and redundancy
7
HIPAA compliance
7
Local mode / networking failsafe
7
8.0
Task tracking
7
Specialty-specific workflows
7
Multi-office / multi-physician capabilities
10

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