Athenahealth Expands AI Capabilities for Ambulatory Practices with AI-Native Platform

The new AI-native capabilities include AI-enhanced document services, intelligent clinical summaries, and interoperability tools. 

Athenahealth is rolling out new artificial intelligence (AI) features for ambulatory providers as part of a broader upgrade to its athenaOne platform. 

The company said the initiative aims to improve physician practice operations across interoperability, patient engagement, clinical documentation, and revenue cycle management.

The new AI-native capabilities include AI-enhanced document services, intelligent clinical summaries, and interoperability tools. 

Athenahealth is also developing features for clinical workflow, revenue cycle management, and patient engagement. The platform’s cloud-native, open architecture allows rapid deployment of these tools across its user base.

Bob Segert, chairman and CEO at Athenahealth, said, "One of the great things about Athena is that the technology was built right from the start. We built an open ecosystem, a full API, and a single source of code, which means every one of our practices is on the same instance. That provides tremendous leverage in how we invest our R&D dollars and how we can impact our practices because as soon as we put the code in, it goes to everybody automatically."

He added, "You can start using technology to do things that you used to have humans do. I think this is a productivity tool and game-changer in the market." Segert emphasized that AI adoption in the next six to twelve months will depend on practices actively using these tools and generating measurable value.

Additionally, Athenahealth is piloting a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that enables communication between AI models and athenaOne. Segert explained, "That will allow anybody on Athena, or any of our partners, and we have over 500 partners connected to our network via our APIs, to build their agents. They can use their agentic AI capabilities, tying into the MCPs to have full access to the needed data to run their own agents."

The company has implemented AI for document processing, reading over a billion pages of faxes and saving data directly into patient charts. Athenahealth is also upgrading ChartSync to reconcile information from external networks and piloting AI-based assistants that generate clinical summaries. Its ambient AI clinical documentation tool integrates with partner scribe companies, including Abridge, Suki AI, and iScribe AI.

Segert noted that the company is focused on easing administrative burdens for independent practices facing staffing shortages and declining reimbursements. "How do we enable these independent practices to thrive in a challenging environment?" he said.

Athenahealth is expanding its platform to specialty care, including women’s health, orthopedics, behavioral health, urgent care, and community health centers. A specialty EHR for ambulatory service centers is expected next year. "It's built on the same chassis. It's just an extension of specialty capabilities tailored for that specialty," Segert added.

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