How Our Team Uses athenaOne’s O-help
When it comes to support for its services, athenahealth offers three main options: the CSC, the Success Community, and O-help. Each has its unique functions and use cases. The CSC primarily handles tech issues and bugs. You can create an online case, call to speak with an agent, or, most recently, walk through self-service articles. The Success Community is a great way to stay in touch with your peers and learn how other organizations are utilizing athena. Stay tuned next month for how Ignite utilizes the Success Community. Lastly, O-help is athena’s version of a user guide—think of it as the owner’s manual for athenaOne. While you can print information, it is constantly being updated by athena SMEs, so it is recommended to revisit topics periodically. Here are the top three ways I leverage O-help in my daily work:
Exploring New Services
O-help is invaluable for rolling out new services within an organization. When I have a customer looking to implement a new service offering, I first turn to O-help to see how that service will integrate into athenaNet. It provides comprehensive guides and step-by-step tutorials, ensuring we seamlessly integrate new offerings into our workflow. For example, many organizations are implementing CCM or similar programs. O-help has information on the Care Plan tab within the chart, the Care Program Panel dashboard, and Chronic Care Management consent.
Understanding New Features
Athena releases three major updates each year. When new functionality or updates are released, O-help offers detailed explanations and practical tips. This resource helps us quickly adapt and utilize the latest features to enhance patient care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rules and functionality around telehealth were rapidly changing. As athena adapted to the changing landscape, O-help was kept up-to-date with an outline of new telehealth features, billing requirements, and revisions to the rules engine.
Onboarding New Hires
For onboarding, O-help serves as a go-to resource for new hires, providing them with essential documentation and training materials. This centralized resource supplements the Learning Portal, streamlining the learning process and ensuring consistent knowledge across the team. When an organization has limited support staff, empowering employees to find answers independently can help alleviate the burden of needing someone to be readily available at all times.
By leveraging O-help, our practices stay current, efficient, and well-prepared to provide top-notch patient care.
Tips and Tricks for Using O-help:
To filter your search — Select a search filter from the drop-down menu on the right, and then click the Search icon.
To search for an exact phrase — Use double quotation marks around the phrase, for example, "magic words."
To search for either of two terms — You can use the word "or" or the pipe character (|). For example, to find all O-help topics that include the word "MA" OR the word "clinical staff," enter this text in the search bar: MA | clinical staff.
To search for a term while excluding another term — Use the exclamation point (!). For example, to find all O-help topics that include the word "templates" but do not include the word "physical exam," enter this text in the search bar: templates ! physical exam.
When you search O-help, you can return to the search results list without re-entering your search keywords by using the double chevron next to the print button in the upper right. You can also toggle to the next result by using the forward double chevron.
Tips for Printing from O-help:
Print just what you want to see — O-help uses drop-downs to show and hide subsections within an article. Before printing an O-help screen, you can click individual sections to expand those you want to see and collapse those you don't need. At the top of the screen, you can click the expand icon to expand or collapse all items on the page.
Click the print icon at the top to print the current O-help page as it appears.
Select your printing options — In the printing options window, select the printer, the number of pages, the number of copies, layout and color options, paper size, print margins, and scale. You can also specify options for printing headers and footers, one- or two-sided printing, and background graphics. Alternatively, you can choose to save as a .pdf.
To use your own printer's options — Click Print Using System Dialog Box at the bottom of the printing options window to access your local printer's features.
O-help also contains a glossary, which is particularly helpful if you’re a newer user of athenaNet. To display the O-help Glossary, click Glossary at the top of any page. The glossary table displays athenahealth terms and definitions. You can search the glossary for specific terms, such as “kick code.”
Searching and printing information from: Tips and Tricks for Searching and Printing O-help Content
-Amanda Van Cleave, Director of Consulting
