Athena’s Summer 2024 Release
Athena's Product Team has done it again!
This summer's 24.7 release is packed with useful features that span all segments of a medical practice and impact the entire patient life cycle with some specialty specific tools that portray athena's commitment to practices of all shapes and sizes.
Obstetric practices have a lot to look forward to! The OB Documentation Experience is a long-awaited transformation of the OB Episode and should really cutdown on documentation time for providers and staff by embedding the Episode directly into the encounter workflow rather than it being a pull-out drawer off to the side.
The Care Plan Enhancements, such as the new template building experience, will allow Care Managers to better customize a Care Plan. The many enhancements applied to the Goals section, such as the new Patient Goal Statement and Baseline Description, will make it easier for Care Managers to coach and track a patient's progress.
The ability to Link Appointments Together for Multi-Encounter Billing during charge entry solves for reimbursement models that athena previously did not support. Billers will no longer have to trudge through a backlog on a misconceiving Missing Slip Worklist and juggle multiple tabs to pull CPTs and ICD10s from numerous appointments into one consolidated claim. This will remove manual charge entry errors and reduce the time to create a consolidated claim.
The Clinical Inbox Enhancements continue to impress with each tri-annual release. This summer’s set of Clinical Inbox Enhancements add on to what was delivered in the Spring Release back in March. The Quick Overview for interfaced and Marketplace Partner lab results layered in with “Quick Actions” will allow providers to breeze through result monitoring.
And let us not forget about the Annotation Improvements - we cannot wait to see how providers leverage these new annotation tools to streamline care coordination with external facilities and internal care team members.
Nothing has the Ignite team more excited than Digital Forms. Administrative, Revenue Cycle, Clinical - Patient Experience, Provider Experience, Staff Experience - This feature hits all components of the medical practice and is especially beneficial for any Telehealth practices who were previously restricted in how they could capture patient registration requirements prior to virtual visits. This feature has the potential to eliminate pre-visit work you might be manually doing to capture patient demographic information.
What Can a Digital Form Do?
Digital forms support three main capabilities:
Custom Text: This might be used to communicate instructions or policies.
Acknowledgement and Consent: Acknowledgements map to default Notice on File fields on the Quickview/Check in pages and require a patient signature. Consents map to data sharing fields on the Quickview/Check in pages and allow a patient to select “I consent” or “I do not consent.”
Registration Questions: Enable a patient to enter data elements that feed directly into the athena Quickview and/or Full Registration page.
The Custom Text or Textbox option allows you to section out content into a Header and Body paragraph. Text can be entered with limited formatting. Bold, italics, underline, bulleted and numbered lists are all supported. There currently is not an option to customize the font or font size.
Digital Forms support Acknowledgement and Consent of typical practice policies and data sharing mechanisms. Each unique Acknowledgement and Consent field added provides the option for a paragraph of free text to further explain what is being acknowledged and consented. Acknowledgements and Consents must be set as Required. Here is a list of the supported forms in this 24.7 release:
Privacy Notice
Release of Billing Information
Assignment of Benefits
Medication History Authority
Immunization/Vaccine Registry Data Sharing
Custom Privacy Checkbox (configured under Practice Manager Admin > Custom Fields > Field Type = Privacy Checkbox)
The ability for a patient to enter responses that map directly back to the Quickview and/or Full Registration is perhaps the biggest value add. This a new paradigm for athena. Practices will get to choose which data points from the Quickview and/or Full Registration are surfaced to a patient to complete. Custom Fields can even be included but require additional consideration. For example, Digital Forms built with Custom Fields will not carry forward any edits/deletions/additions to the Practice Manager Admin > Custom Fields Table. Simply put, if you build a Digital Form with a Custom Field then later delete that Custom Field from the Practice Manager Admin table, it will remain on the Digital Form unless you also delete the Custom Field from the Digital Form as well.
Patient responses that map to a data point within the chart are currently not supported. However, the Summer 24.7 features for Social History and Surgical History within Enhanced Self Check-in may assist with a use case you have in mind!
The new Digital Forms feature also supports PDF generation upon patient completion. The PDF would be stored as an Admin document type in the patient chart. The Class of “Admin” cannot be edited but the Sub-class and Label options are customizable when configuring the Digital Form. Sub-class options include Signed Forms & Letters, Consent, HIPAA/Privacy, Legal, Medical Records Request and Billing Document. The Label field pulls from athena’s Global Labels.
When Will Patients Have Access to Digital Forms?
Digital Forms are introduced to a patient when completing self-check-in. Your practice must utilize Enhanced Self Check-In and have the Self Check-in Portal setting enabled to use Digital Forms. For more information on athena’s Enhanced versus Legacy Self Check-in, review the feature comparison guide on the athena Success Community.
Digital Forms are configured under Communicator Admin using the Self Check-In Settings page. When configuring a Digital Form, your practice will be able to control the frequency, departments, providers, specialties, appointment types and patient age that you would like that specific form to appear for during Enhanced Self Check-in. A Patient Facing Name may also be configured if needed.
The Frequency option within the Digital Form is critical to understanding patient experience. Your practice will have the option to select from a dropdown that includes: every time, once a week, once a month, once every six months or once a year. The Frequency option is rather intuitive and acts off expiration dates set within the fields of the form itself. Athena’s Enhanced Self Check-in will override the frequency specified on a form if the corresponding acknowledgement or consent is null or expired on the patient’s Quickview.
This Sounds a Lot Like Clinical Paper Forms... How are Digital Forms Different?
This feature does not replace the highly utilized Clinical Paper Form capability entirely (at least not yet! We are on the edge of our seat to see where athena product will take this feature next). If your practice uses Clinical Paper Forms for Patient Education and Letters, then keep managing them as Clinical Paper Forms. If your practice uses Clinical Paper Forms for capturing patient Consents and Patient Registration, then you might consider migrating over to Digital Forms or using a hybrid approach. Keep in mind that the only free response questions that are supported within Digital Forms at this time are for data points that live within the Quickview and/or Full Registration page. That means if you have a form that requires patient responses for data points that are not on the Quickview/Full Registration page, you will need to consider building those data points as custom fields or keeping the form as a Clinical Paper Form.
Unlike Clinical Paper Forms, Digital Forms cannot be printed and handed to a patient to complete during an in-person check-in. Digital Forms can only be referenced and printed from the patient Chart after the patient completes the form. If you are a hybrid practice with Telehealth and face to face visits, you may consider keeping registration forms in both Digital Forms and Clinical Paper Forms. If you choose to map registration forms in both locations, ensure appointment types are appropriately mapped to avoid having the patient receive the form twice during the Self Check-in experience. If your practice has patients that check in directly with your front desk that prefer receiving a paper copy to complete, then you should also keep forms under the Clinical Paper Form umbrella.
Is it Possible to Track Patient Responses to Registration Questions?
Data integrity and reporting require additional consideration before bringing Digital Forms live. Since patient responses to Registration Questions update the Quickview and Full Registration page automatically, the “Show History” link on the bottom of the Full Registration page is the best place to identify if data was updated via Enhanced Self Check-in or updated by a practice user. The specific update will be linked to “athena - Patient Reported Data WebAPI (MDP Partner)” if the update occurred during Self Check-in. The PHI Modification report option in Report Builder can also be utilized to track changes made by a patient through Digital Forms during Enhanced Self Check-in. The username associated with the event will be an API ID.
How To Launch Digital Forms?
If you plan to migrate any forms from Clinical Paper Forms over to Digital Forms or build new forms as Digital Forms, give your IS or athena maintenance teams plenty of ramp up time. Tasks required to bring Digital Forms into the Enhanced Self Check-in Experience include:
Decision on which forms should be added as Digital Forms and which forms should be unmapped from Clinical Paper Forms
Build forms under Communicator Admin > Self Check-in Settings > Forms & Signatures
Test forms
Un-map or expire the Clinical Paper Form equivalent under Clinicals Admin as necessary
With plans to continue expanding the Digital Forms feature, there is no telling how it will transform your practice.
Looking for more tips on how to prep for your org for athena Releases? Check out Ignite’s athenaOne Readiness Blog.
