Leading vendor of cloud-based services for physician practices, Athenahealth (ATHN) recently unveiled its new online dashboard to inform viewers about the performance of doctors on its network against the meaningful use parameter. Viewers of this dashboard, which will be updated regularly, will glean important data regarding how medical practitioners, taking part in the company’s meaningful use disbursement program, are progressing toward satisfying the requirements.
The dashboard provides information on the criteria that are posing major problems for practitioners as they seek to comply with the attestation process and thereby qualify for incentive payments.
Athenahealth continues to work in tandem with its clients to assure their complete compliance with the requisites of the Medicaid and Medicare incentive programs. The company has a timely view, through its cloud-based Electronic Health Record (“EHR”), of how practitioners are faring. This enables it to locate bottlenecks faced by its customers and deploy its range of services to solve the problem.
On the whole, Athenahealth is able to work closely with its clients, while providing them with a range of services, which enables them to overcome the hurdles of Medicare meaningful use.
Visitors to the company’s site can view all 20 meaningful use measures, gauge the latest performance of participating practitioners against each parameter and appreciate the steps undertaken by the company to facilitate the success of its customers.
As per the dashboard, the Clinical Summary measure is one of the most challenging requirements for practitioners. According to this measure, doctors are required to send clinical summaries to their patients for a minimum of one-half of all office-based visits within 3 working days. For a variety of reasons, practices have found this requirement difficult to fulfill. Athenahealth has expended considerable resources to enable practices satisfy this measure and is now witnessing major progress in this area.
Athenahealth’s doctors seem to be faring well compared with the program results furnished by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”). It is found that 100% of the Athenahealth doctors taking part in the federal incentive program are on a meaningful use certified EHR.
Besides, 11% have already attested to Medicare requisites and 63.3% are one or two measures away from fulfilling all requirements. As per data provided by CMS in July 2011, 2,246, or 3% of practitioners, registered for various Medicaid and Medicare meaningful use incentive programs, have attested to complying with all its criteria.
Athenahealth provides a federal stimulus bonus payment guarantee mechanism, which ensures that its cloud offerings assist physicians to fulfill EHR certification requirements for qualifying under Medicare meaningful use and receive the 1-year incentives available as per the HITECH Act. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided the final definition of meaningful use in July 2010 and the program was launched on January 3, 2011. Doctors may take part in Athenahealth’s Medicare meaningful use guarantee program prior to June 30, 2012.
Despite improved growth prospects, Athenahealth faces stiff competition across all its operating platforms from established Health IT players, such as Cerner (CERN), Allscripts-Misys (MDRX) and Quality Systems (QSII). Nevertheless, the company remains optimistic regarding the growth prospects in each of its end markets due to the federal stimulus program, which promotes EHR adoption in ambulatory and hospital settings.
Athenahealth’s Software as a service (“SaaS”)-based approach allows for a lower cost and more flexible delivery mechanism that is expected to help the company win deals. We believe that the company’s focused marketing approach is paying dividends, in the form of a large proportion of double barrel and triple barrel deals or cross-selling in which more than one solution is sold to a client.
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