athenaOne Reviews

Athena and this app are EXACTLY what an EMR should NOT be.
I have never seen an EMR that cannot trend labs… ( how can you trend a pdf scan?). I am a nephrologist that works on trends…
this app’s other non starter issue with me is that it messes completely the schedule of the desktop version that i have to rearrange every time i make the mistake of opening athena one. They used to have another mobile app, which despite being clunky like all of Athena, at least didn’t mess my schedule.
In summary, this is an evil application that is one of the main reasons i am considering early retirement.

athenaOne is pretty useless. If I’m away from the office, I can view my schedule. However if I need to contact a patient athenaOne will not provide a simple phone number to reach the patient. The old app provided that information and more with no problem . Why would you change a good thing and create problems when it comes to patient servicing? ......and now the mobile app will not allow me to sign in with my user name and password.

I set my bar low and didn’t expect this to be the ultimate tool during patient care anyways, and was just content checking patient list and maybe quick check on inbox… but these notifications, totally useless and annoying, finally decided to write a review after months of use (and hoping it’d be fixed), if you click on a notification, you get stuck in login screen after login screen after login screen, etc; and even if you open athenaOne , never clears away from the Notification Center, forever stuck and building stacks there.
Just going to turn off all notification fro athenaOne (and athenaText does the exact same thing, but at least I really do need the alert for that one…)

Why did you phase out the old app? The new app, in my humble opinion, is horribly designed and frustrating. I can’t get to old encounter documents without going through an endless number of clicks. I prep by looking up my old encounter and reviewing old encounter documents (audiograms, scope pictures). Now it takes me 10-15 min to just find what I need to review(after practicing for an hour!) and that doesn’t even count reviewing! Please don’t delete the old app it was easy to use and I don’t need all this extraneous information just for a quick review.
I’m sure the prep part will be good but for those of us who use it to review the patients for the upcoming day athenaOne is a nightmare.
Are physicians involved in your designs??

athenaOne has great potential, but falls short due to instability. It keeps locking up or crashing for me. I’m not sure that it is a cost effective use of my time. Spending hours outside of the clinic to save minutes during my clinical time is at best frustrating.

I am not sure if they are addressing the frequent system crashes, but if they could make athenaOne more stable, it would be well worth having it. As it is now I only use it when I have ample “down time” to allow for the time sink of using athenaOne .

Unfortunately I cannot use athenaOne reliably right now. There are so many glitches and moments where athenaOne freezes. Face ID login does not work for me at all, once it accepts my face athenaOne just stays on the login screen and I cannot get into athenaOne . Once I am able to get in, athenaOne gets stuck quite often and I have to close out and restart my phone to try again. It’s much more of a hassle than helpful right now. Currently using on up to date iPhone 12 with most recently updated Athena One app.

I gotta say, athenaOne/service in general left me more frustrated than anything else. It worked perfectly sending me a text to verify the account as it should until the medical provider part. After that i could not get it to text (the number it literally had just texted) me at all, prompting me to retry on three separate internet browsers and eventually athenaOne to get it working. Still wouldn't. So I reset the whole account, set up a security question instead and wow, "the Athena health service is unable to log you in!" Error came up. OK.... one last thing, I'll call the people with athenaOne then. After talking with the lady on the phone, she told me that they can't access the medical records of patients, ok that's fine, I don't want you to anyways I just want to be able to use athenaOne . So then she tells me that it must be something with the medical provider not having provided my number? Even though I got an invite from them and it all worked up until the point that athenaOne needed to text me a second time? Maybe it is something with them but now I'm just confused and upset.

athenaOne itself is a little clunky and tedious to navigate at times. However, the real downfall of Athena is their support team. It’s absolute trash. If you can’t fix the issue yourself, prepare to have weeks pass before your issue is resolved or better yet, acknowledged as a verified issue and then subsequently informed that they won’t do anything about it until more people complain about a similar issue.

The new app is not nearly as personal as the old one it is quicker in some respects but you can’t search old documents at all with any significant date range and for example if you’re trying to search of patients operative report history you can’t go more than a few months back or any window more than a few months. It’s really hampers the ability to search old records on a patient and the old version of athenaOne did not have this problem. I’ve asked multiple times to have this fixed from the software engineers to no avail.

Death by a thousand clicks. 2-3 times as long to perform same tasks as required in some competitors’ EMR design. Fairly disorganized and discombobulated data presentation and almost non existent filters to permit finding targeted or user- specific notes and data over extended periods.

The technology exists to design an EMR that is intuitive, learns users patterns and permits user- specific work flows. One day there will be an EMR that physicians truly want to use rather than are compelled to use. For now, we’ll have to be content spending more time focusing on data entry and clicking through bureaucratic hoops over actually focusing on patient care. How did physicians loose control of our work environment ?

athenaOne is a great idea but does need some work to make it more efficient and effective. For example, when using an iPad with an external keyboard, AthenaText will not allow for the conversation to be shown horizontally which requires me to type sideways. Also, I am not able to pull information from the last encounter note into the open encounter note as you are able to do through the website and I have not found the option to amend previously closed encounters so I am having to wait to do that until I get home to my physical laptop. Again, great idea but needs some work :)

Signing orders is not as quick and efficient as it is within the browser application and therefore takes much longer to complete. Inefficient use of screen space. Getting from one order to the next is not smooth. Could be done a lot better as I know AthenaHealth is capable.

athenaOne being available to staff is a huge help for when the Internet is out. The only improvement I would suggest is to be able to check the patient in somehow! We had clinic hours recently during an internet outage and we were able to do a lot from the phone app except for checking in.

Love that I can use my iPad for my encounters. Few suggestion that can improve my daily routine .

1. Faster loading and refresh times
2. I wish that when I open up to document within any section (ie. Free Text), that it can just open a bubble or a smaller window, as oppose to a whole window that takes up the whole screen.
3. A smaller front page to display the inbox and messages and more emphasis on the patient schedules. Similar to he desktop version.
4. In regards to replying/closing labs and documents, I would be nicer to have the action placed nexts to the text box.
5. Give us he ability to determine text sizes on the screen. The current text size is too big.
6. Lastly, gotta have a dark mode setting !

Thank you for creating athenaOne!

athenaOne is really wonderful for being able to quickly log into your patient list for the day. It is also very convenient for adding photos, for example of skin lesions, to a patient’s chart. No synchronizing your phone to a patient’s chart or anything like you have to with “Athena capture”.

There are a couple of issues I would love to see addressed. The first is that when you’re viewing the schedule, athenaOne automatically right refreshes every so often which jumps you back to the top of the schedule making it very frustrating, if not impossible to follow along during a team huddle. The second thing is that I would love to see write to text support in the text fields. This only makes sense for a mobile app that many providers will use on an iPad to help quickly document things in a room.

I find athenaOne very useful for checking labs, rads and consults quickly from wherever I happen to be. New new notification of Athena text is very helpful (sometimes not looking at desk top and sometimes the Athena text function quite working on the laptop and there was no way to know without checking - now there is! Could use work on reliably opening with faceID (it unlocks but says “credentials expired, log in again - which I do but still need to force close app and do it again for app to open). Finally it is now easier to send patient feedback on labs and rads, but it is still hard to tell if PT has portal access; all-in-all it saves time and improves access - mainly when away from my laptop

I started using athenaOne with patients after forgetting my laptop at home one day and after using it the day I may make it my main source for patient encounters!

There is still room for improvement though. The main issue I found is when you use any “special characters” like quotation marks for instance, it doesn’t communicate to the chart, it instead replaces them with a question mark like it doesn’t know what the heck a quotation mark is. It did this with a few other characters too.

Another ~mildly annoying~ thing is the timeout for automatically logging you out. I respect the automatic log out but maybe include face id to re-login so it’ll make logging in a bit easier instead of having to type your password out again. Or just take the time out off completely for devices with a passcode set because it doesn’t seem necessary then.

Include the vitals to be added with exam too.

LASTLY and most importantly, fix the issue where you can’t view certain documents without having to be on a computer, make athenaOne better by allowing for not even needing a computer when you can do it all through your phone if you wanted to.

Apart from those suggestions it is pretty awesome!

Thanks!

Simply the easiest and most complete EHR to begin with, athenahealth has produced a completely usable app which allows providers to do anything and everything right from a phone or an iPad. Even seeing patients and documentation is easy and dictation is absolutely perfect.
Cannot do better. The best. Full. Stop.

Awesome updates with viewing upcoming encounters and prepping charts. Athena just added dictation, and almost the entire encounter plan can be run from the phone. Excellent for efficiency, please continue to update the voice recognition feature to recognize MEDICAL lingo/vocabulary.

Great new mobile app! User interface is really easy to use and has already made a significant impact on my daily workflow. It's super helpful for my days off and when I'm on call if I want to quickly review labs and patient cases on the go. Only other functionality I wish it had is a way to close encounters/office visits after reviewing them. Otherwise, a very well thoughtout app that integrates well with the Athena system.

Helps speed up my workflow by about 20% and I have only used it for 2 days