For years (even before founding altr), our team has had the pleasure of seeing athenahealth grow first-hand from a fearless, mission driven start-up to now becoming a national leader in healthcare IT. During this time, the world of healthcare has changed significantly: from the continued push towards value-based care and the rise of Electronic Health Records, to the growth of more consumer-focused health services. Through it all, athenahealth has been helping healthcare providers navigate these changes to better serve patients while protecting and growing their practices’ business.
As a cloud-based EHR, billing, and patient communication platform, athenahealth has unmatched visibility into how medical practices and hospital systems work (and sometimes don’t work). This intelligence has informed athena’s product and service strategy and gives athena’s customers access to best practice information that helps them better manage their own businesses. With athena, software is only part of the service – while their competitors are mostly just traditional software providers. So when you consider the value of this intelligence to customers, athena has fewer direct competitors than prospective customers might think.
As part of athenahealth’s efforts to showcase the advantages of its network-enabled healthcare IT service over stand-alone software, altr was brought in to work with the athena team to create a simple performance assessment and optimization tool. The application leveraged the company’s insights into the activities of over 87,000 healthcare providers to provide prospective clients with a benchmark on how they perform relative to other practices, along with proven best practices to increase clinical and financial productivity, reduce cost, and encourage growth.
The performance assessment application was designed to inspire consultative discussions with attendees at health IT conferences like MGMA and HiMSS and has been further customized to provide visitors to athenahealth.com with actionable, best practice advice. The new performance assessment application is one more example from athenahealth that shows how data-driven network knowledge can make healthcare run better.
