OhioHealth selects athenaCommunicator to manage patient interactions

athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based business services for physician practices, today announced that OhioHealth, a family of not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare organizations consisting of more than 900 physicians serving patients throughout a 40-county area in Ohio since 1891, has selected athenaCommunicator, athenahealth's patient communication service. athenaCommunicator is designed to manage patient interactions triggered by practice staff or by automated routines within athenaNet^®, athenahealth's cloud-based platform. This implementation expands on a successful relationship with OhioHealth, who have been using athenahealth's revenue cycle management service, athenaCollector^®, since 2003.

OhioHealth's decision to implement athenaCommunicator for its growing network of physicians was a result of their interest in harnessing the volumes of data accessible through athenaCollector to further improve collection services and patient communications. Still in the early days of using athenaCommunicator, OhioHealth has been able to positively impact patient convenience and satisfaction, as well as reduce workload demands across their multi-organization system.

At its core, athenaCommunicator goes well beyond medical scheduling software as it improves all patient interactions outside the office walls, ultimately paving the way for improved access, care, and profitability while reducing staff time across the patient workflow.

Mark Wuestewald, Director, Revenue Cycle for OhioHealth, said, "We have experienced a significant increase in our business every year for the last three years, and, based on our current strategic plan, we expect this trend to continue. The accelerated growth within our network of physician practices forced us to look at options for generating positive care outcomes at a lower cost. athenaCommunicator promotes an integrated approach for patients to access and manage their appointment and financial options with more personal control, and with this service, OhioHealth practitioners can tap into features such as coordinated self-pay collections and automated after-hours appointment reminders to effectively communicate with patients, not only during a visit but when that patient is outside the walls of the exam room. The fact that we are able to build and further customize this product based on the individual needs of our diverse practices, as well as the corporate collective effort, proves the excellence in level of insight and ingenuity at athenahealth."

Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth, added, "We admire OhioHealth for taking the next steps to streamline their operations and improve care coordination by harnessing athenahealth's services that at the root are uniquely positioned because they operate utilizing the Internet, not as a stagnant piece of software that's unable to be updated in real-time. OhioHealth has been a trusted business partner for years, and we are excited to continue to work closely with them throughout the implementation process and look forward to improved communication between their providers and patients."