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Disentangling from Athena EMR (Jay C. Goldstein DPM)

06/20/2012      John Scheland, DPM


I have made just about every error one can make trying to implement meaningless use. Athena Health was one of those errors. The amount of complication you will have will depends on how much of it you have already implemented. There are a few things to keep in mind.

First and foremost is the maintenance of the health record. Second, is the maintenance of the billing portion and lastly is the maintenance of the scheduling portion. You have to call them and then send a letter of your intentions. They will try to keep you by offering different packages. In the end, you will be given a certain amount of transition time, I think two months, to access your account.

They will send you password-protected disks of your records to have once your access is finished. This is important for the health record portion. (I printed everything and continued with paper afterwards).

The billing portion is the most complicated. You have to contact all your payers to change the pay-to address again. For me, it was easiest to re-hire my old biller to assist me with this. I also paid him extra to help work the dashboard to collect the difficult uncollected monies (he did a much better job!). The US Bank account they set up for you remains tricky as secondary payers will continue to pay into this account for quite some time.

Remember this is YOUR bank account. The SinglePoint online access with this will then be charged to you and costs around $139/mo to continue using them. The Bank will automatically deduct it from your account so maintain this for your expense records. You should keep it active for 6-8 months until you can identify the payers and change the pay-to address.

Some secondary payers will just keep paying into that account until you finally close the account. When the monthly amount of money becomes small enough, just close the account and the medicare secondary payers have to find you. Athena will forward checks they recieve to you. I have found them to be good with this.

The loss of the scheduler will be surprisingly disruptive to your staff and you should implement a system (paper or otherwise) almost immediately so that patient flow is not disrupted. Don't speed into another mistake until you are sure your new EHR is a good fit to your practice.

John Scheland, DPM, Clarks Summit, PA, limblengthener@yahoo.com