athenahealth Vs Epic - Which Fits Your Practice

Features

The features offered by an EHR can be the most critical factor in determining the success of a system. Each EHR has its own characteristics and capabilities that can help or hinder healthcare organizations. For example, athenahealth is designed to provide an integrated platform for medical practices, while Epic is designed for larger healthcare organizations.

Pricing

The cost of an EHR system is another essential factor to consider. Various pricing models help healthcare organizations determine the best system for them. athenahealth and Epic have subscription-based pricing models, making it easier to budget your costs.

Implementation Process

Healthcare organizations often overlook the implementation process of an EHR. However, it is paramount to understand how the EHR system will be implemented and what resources are needed to ensure the project’s success. In addition, understanding the implementation process can help you ensure your organization is prepared to transition to a new EHR.

Customer Support

No EHR is perfect, and problems are bound to arise. Healthcare organizations need to understand the customer support capabilities of a system before investing in one. Customer support doesn’t only cover access to technical personnel but also access to resources such as user manuals and training videos.

User Experience

Finally, we will look at the user experience of using the EHR. Imagine this as the overall satisfaction of using the system; this is a crucial factor in determining whether healthcare organizations will be successful in their EHR implementation. To get a complete grasp of the user experience, we will look at some user reviews to dive deep into the details of using each EHR system.

So now that we know which parameters we will be looking at, let’s start comparing athenahealth and Epic without further ado.

athenahealth Vs Epic: Which Has Better Features?

All EHR have some basic features that are paramount to their success. These are almost always present in every self-respecting EHR. Let’s look at how athenahealth and Epic have their unique take on them.

• Patient scheduling
• Revenue Cycle
• Clinical documentation
• Analytics
• Interoperability capabilities

Let’s compare athenahealth and Epic on these features.

Patient Scheduling

athenahealth and Epic both empower patients to easily book and manage their appointments. Each software offers automatic reminders, enabling practices to take proactive steps to ensure patient satisfaction.

In athenahealth, patients can view a calendar to find available appointment times and schedule an appointment with the click of a button. This helps patients schedule appointments that work best, but also reduces the amount of administrative work for the staff.

Dana Wolf, Director of Quality Programs, Coastal Pediatric Associates, had this to say about athenahealth’s patient engagement capabilities:

“It takes a lot of work off our plates…”

In Epic, patients can access their personal health portal, named “MyChart”, which allows them to view and manage appointments and other patient information, including finances and comprehensive health records. Furthermore, with Epic, you can connect care teams and patients at a distance, even invite translators or family members to join.

Revenue Cycle

Both athenahealth and Epic offer powerful RCM features such as coverage verification, claim submission, payment processing, and denial resolution.

athenahealth integrates with your current clinical solution and provides you with automated tools. It also enables practices to better track payments, reducing the time spent on manual processes. With a constantly updated billing rules engine, athenahealth enables practices to remain compliant with changing regulations. Furthermore, enhanced claims resolution, medical coding, and authorization management enable practices to increase their collections.

Epic’s Digital Front Door allows patients to take control of their healthcare by offering direct access to price estimates and payment options. Epic also offers referral management authorization and the ability to automate the revenue cycle, enabling the staff to reduce administrative time. Finally, Epic also helps patients verify their coverage electronically, expedite claims payments, and set up self-pay arrangements.

Clinical Documentation

athenahealth offers a range of clinical tools, including e-prescribing, document imaging, and order tracking. With its new athenaClinicals tool, practices can easily capture patient data from any device and automatically update it to the EHR system. It helps to save time as medical staff no longer have to manually enter vital information. Furthermore, practitioners can use fully integrated voice recognition software to quickly enter data into the system.

Epic offers a comprehensive suite of clinical tools, such as order entry, lab management, and analytics capabilities. It also has an in-built speech recognition feature, which allows users to dictate notes into the system.

Analytics

R. Hal Baker, MD, CDO, WellSpan Health, explains analytics brilliantly in the following:

“The purpose of analytics is not to run reports frequently. The purpose is to make us better at what we do. And the way to do that is to ask users: why do you want this information, and what do you plan to do with it?”

athenahealth offers real-time patient insights and automated population health analytics. This helps practices assess patient outcomes, track performance goals, and identify risk factors for better care coordination.

Epic uses AI to integrate vast amounts of data and transform it into actionable insights. You can choose from ready-made algorithms or build your own. Furthermore, you can combine real-world evidence and view peer benchmarks to gain valuable insights into your patient’s health and how it can be improved.

Interoperability Capabilities

Interoperability is the key to ensuring healthcare organizations have seamless data exchange between systems. It allows essential patient information to be shared among stakeholders, increasing efficiency and improving patient care.

athenahealth has a comprehensive network of more than 150,000 providers and payers, making exchanging data with external entities easier. Furthermore, their API enables practices to access data across multiple systems and platforms.

Epic has interoperability suite that allows healthcare organizations to connect with other systems such as labs, pharmacies, and other EHRs. Epic offers three ways to connect to these systems:

• EHR
• Community Partner
• The patient (Share Everywhere)

Epic has shared over 360 million records with these connections, and there is no sign of stopping.

Epic Vs athenahealth: Which Is More Budget-Friendly?

Regarding pricing, both athenahealth and Epic have subscription-based models that can help organizations budget for their EHR needs.

athenahealth charges a percentage of collections as their cost for serving organizations of all sizes with different requirements, goals and complexities. However, they guarantee desired results without hidden fees and only get paid when organizations achieve them.

On the other hand, Epic is ideal for larger organizations. However, it can be customized to accommodate small to medium healthcare organizations.

As such, both software can be customized per the organization’s needs and offer tailored pricing plans.

A customized plan helps organizations select the features that are relevant to them and provides cost certainty. However, it can be challenging to determine which is more budget-friendly as the cost depends on the characteristics and number of users.

Feel free to contact our customer support team to get a tailor-made pricing plan for your organization.

athenahealth Vs Epic: What Is The Implementation Process?

If you want to expand your operations, athenahealth’s web-based platform is better than Epic’s server-based deployment.

Server-based deployment means that organizations must make room in their existing infrastructure for the Epic system and configure certain administrative settings. It can be quite time-consuming and requires constant maintenance. Furthermore, the associated hardware cost can be quite high.

athenahealth, on the other hand, is web-based, which means organizations do not need to purchase any additional hardware. It makes the setup more accessible and much more cost-effective.

Epic Vs athenahealth: What Is Customer Support Like?

Both Epic and athenahealth offer a range of customer support options.

athenahealth provides 24/7 customer service with dedicated account managers. They also have a robust online knowledge base with tutorials, user manuals, and helpful FAQs.

Likewise, Epic also provides 24/7 customer support and offers a range of training resources such as webinars, online tutorials, and in-person instructor-led classes. You can also access their online community to post questions or concerns and get other Epic users’ feedback.

athenahealth Vs Epic: What Is The User Experience?

According to a report from Reaction Data, a research firm that surveyed many physicians throughout the US about their satisfaction with electronic health records (EHR), only 39% of physicians were satisfied with the athenahealth platform. Among the respondents, 50% worked in outpatient settings, while only 13% of those who worked in hospitals were satisfied. Around 19% of those surveyed had mixed feelings about the product.

The same report shows that Epic outperformed athenahealth in terms of satisfaction with their EHR. 45% of users reported being happy with Epic, with 48% working in the acute setting and 41% in ambulatory care. About 22% had mixed feelings.

These numbers are backed by the ratings on Software Advice too.

From a total of 347 reviews, Epic has 197 5-star reviews. Conversely, from a total of 764 reviews, athenahealth only has 258 5-star reviews.

The Final Verdict

To compare athenahealth and Epic, is to compare apples and oranges. Both EHR systems have their strengths and weaknesses, making choosing one over the other difficult.

athenahealth offers a more cost-effective solution as it is web-based and does not require additional hardware. It also offers powerful analytics capabilities and user-friendly patient scheduling features.

Epic is ideal for larger organizations because of its comprehensive suite of clinical tools and robust interoperability capabilities. It also has an in-built speech recognition feature that lets users to quickly document patient data.

Ultimately, choosing the best EHR system depends on an organization’s requirements and the features it needs. However, if you still struggle to decide, please contact our customer support team for more information. We are always happy to help!

This article will help you make the best decision for your organization.