At HIMSS24, athenahealth focuses on the experience of healthcare providers

ORLANDO – As HIMSS24 kicks off this week, with preconference forums buzzing all day Monday and the show floor will open at 10am after opening opening speech On Tuesday, more than 1,100 exhibitors, large and small, will prepare their stands to present their latest health IT products and strategies.

Among them is one company that has been coming to the world conference for about as long as anyone else in the exhibit hall: athenahealth.

This year’s flagship exhibitor is really focused on ensuring that the entire market understands our commitment to healing the complexities of healthcare, whether that’s through technological innovation, whether that’s through integrated data or through carefully curated partnerships around the world. ecosystem,” said Jessica Sweeney-Platt, vice president, research and editorial strategy at athenahealth.

“We’re going to highlight a lot of different ways that this combination of technology, data and making sure all the different players in the ecosystem can connect and talk to each other will make life easier for the practices and the physicians we serve.”

Healthcare provider experience has been critical to healthcare in recent years – beginning perhaps a decade ago when the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has upgraded its famous Triple Aim to Quadruple Aim“adding the goal of improving the work lives of healthcare providers, including physicians and staff.”

The past four years – marked by a world-disrupting pandemic that has stretched healthcare systems and their physicians to the breaking point – have only exacerbated the burden and burnout felt by the workforce. But even without that added challenge, many of the pain points doctors and nurses feel revolve around fundamental issues around interoperability, data management, workflow, and electronic health record design.

Last month, athenahealth published its third Survey on the sentiment of doctors. The headline reads: “Nearly all US physicians surveyed regularly feel burned out, while many have considered a career change.”

“The numbers were not encouraging, to say the least,” Sweeney-Platt said. “About 94% of (physicians) agreed that getting the right data at the right time is one of their top priorities. And yet a majority of them feel so overloaded by the amount of information coming through all these different sources they find that it increases their stress level and that it is a major contributor to burnout.”

That’s why athenahealth is prioritizing “better curated information flows,” and will talk about it in depth at HIMSS24, she said. “Probably the best example of that is a phrase we use called ‘experiential interoperability.’

“It’s not enough to just open up the pipes in healthcare and increase the amount of information,” Sweeney-Platt explains. “The problem we have in healthcare today isn’t that we don’t have enough information – it’s that we don’t have enough insight. So experience interoperability is about making the right information available at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way. place in one’s workflow.”

To achieve that goal, athenahealth will be previewing a new feature at HIMSS24 called ChartSyncwhich allows incoming data to be consolidated and deduplicated so that it can be placed in a common format before appearing in a physician’s workflow.

“It’s essentially a feature that allows users of different electronic health records to see an integrated view of a patient’s information,” she said. “So if you’re a surgeon and you’re operating on a patient in a hospital that’s running on one system, and your office is on another system, you’re going to see an integrated view of that patient’s information across both systems. Those EHRs. We will preview this at HIMSS and roll it out more widely throughout the rest of the year.”

Among other priorities in Orlando, the company (which was a founding member of the CommonWell Health Alliance 11 years ago at HIMSS23) will also focus heavily on health data sharing this year. CommonWell was approved this past year to participate in TEFCA as a Qualified Health Information Network.

“We will be at the Interoperability Showcase as part of a CommonWell demonstration,” Sweeney-Platt said. “We are still very committed to that partnership, and we were an early proponent of it, and so we will demonstrate that with them in the interoperability showcase.”

But it probably won’t surprise you that another major focus for athenahealth will be the two letters that are so often pronounced together these days.

“Everyone is talking about AI, and we are no different than anyone else,” she said. “We know this is important to our customers.”

It’s important, of course, because for all the hopes placed on AI’s transformative potential, much of its appeal lies in what it can already achieve, in perhaps more modest ways, for providers in the here and now. Automation and “small AI” tweaks have enormous potential to make workflows and other clinical processes more efficient and effective.

Sweeney-Platt says that about 83% of physicians surveyed for the aforementioned study say that “they think AI could ultimately reduce many of the problems they face. But they’re not seeing much of that yet.

“And so we have some of our executives – our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Nele Jessel, and our senior data architect, Heather Lane – who are going to give a presentation on the lessons we’ve learned from the seven-plus years. that at athenahealth we develop models for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“As our Chief Product Officer likes to say, we didn’t just discover AI when ChatGPT was released a year and a half ago. We’ve been integrating these capabilities into different capabilities, in-home products, for a long time. And Heather and Neela will talk about that in their presentation. The lessons we learned from some of those early efforts.”

One of the things the company will highlight at its booth is “how the athenaOne experience overall is simplified for the average user – and AI is a big part of that story.” It took a back seat in our products for a while. It focuses on things like capturing information from insurance cards and automating some of the manual work involved in selecting insurance packages. It focuses on things like prioritizing what the doctor sees in his or her inbox. So it’s not some of the bigger, flashier things, but it’s been an ongoing commitment of ours for a number of years.”

Especially Dr. Jessel is “passionate” about the countless ways AI can help improve healthcare. “She’ll talk about it a lot now that AI is really becoming a little bit more prominent, much more prominent – ​​it’s entering the patient experience; it’s entering the direct clinical experience – we have to be super careful with testing and learning and ensuring that any consequences that arise from using that type of technology are intended consequences, not unintended consequences.”

After all, the experiences of patients and caregivers are “so connected,” says Sweeney-Platt. “I don’t believe you can have a great patient experience unless you also have a great clinical experience. Those two things are very closely intertwined.”

This past year HIMSS23, the company debuted the athenaPatient app, a free-standing mobile app designed to “provide a true consumer experience for both patients and physicians,” she said. “We’ve had over a million downloads of it since we launched it about a year ago, so that will be reflected in our stand as well.

“We have also made some important advances in the past year in patient scheduling and improving the scheduling experience for both the clinic user and the patient,” she added. “Because again, if you can’t get access to the doctor, if the schedule isn’t open and flexible enough, if you can’t get access to the schedule, then you can’t have any experience.”

And new partnerships will also be highlighted at the athenahealth booth on the show floor.

“One of our product directors is going to demonstrate how we worked with Humana and Availity to develop an end-to-end electronic pre-authentication process. It’s part of the commitment to automate the work for practices and exchanges. Again, not something we did on our own, but mainly in collaboration.

“And we’ll be unveiling a case study in which Surescripts talks about how our collaboration has both improved medication adherence and delivered millions of dollars in cost savings.”

And as always, the cloud-based IT pioneer – “we were cloud before cloud cool,” Sweeney-Platt jokes – will have a major presence in its booth for our athenahealth Marketplace, which consists of some 470 partners, she says. .

“We are always looking for new companies to join the market. So we will have many opportunities for people to come and talk to us about integrating their solutions with athenaOne. It’s all part of making sure making the ecosystem as closely connected as we can possibly make it.”

Athenahealth will be at booth #3740 at HIMSS24.