CenterWell, Humana's senior-focused primary care division, has implemented athenahealth's fully integrated electronic health record with a suite of artificial intelligence tools across its primary care clinic network.
Last summer, athenahealth rolled out AI features for ambulatory providers as part of a larger upgrade to an "AI-native" athenaOne platform. AthenaOne is a cloud-based suite of integrated EHR, revenue cycle and practice management and patient engagement products powered by advanced AI-native capabilities.
CenterWell Senior Primary Care and Conviva provide care to 500,000 patients, making it one of the largest providers of senior-focused primary care in the U.S.
Humana has now implemented the solution across 350 CenterWell Senior Primary Care and Conviva Care Center locations in 15 states, supporting more than 1,300 clinicians.
“CenterWell is deeply committed to providing high-quality, integrated and personalized care for seniors,” said Reneé Buckingham, president of CenterWell Senior Primary Care, in a statement. “Implementing athenaOne across our senior-focused primary care centers is helping CenterWell streamline clinical and operational workflows while improving how we deliver care, empowering our teams and serving our patients.”
CenterWell's scale and complexity and its value-based care model make athenahealth's platform an ideal ambulatory solution to support a growing network of primary care centers, noted Bob Segert, chairman and CEO of athenahealth.
"That type of complexity often does well with our type of solution, given its scalable nature and the fact that they're focused on value-based care and helping seniors is important as well, because athena has invested over the years in amazing tools around quality management, risk scoring, care management, care planning, all fully population health, all fully embedded into what we do at athena in the native application," Segert told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
Athenahealth's solutions help support physicians to deliver more proactive, preventive care for patients, Segert noted.
The company also offers payer solutions for data exchange and to help close care gaps and improve care quality.
"We have a service called Moments of Care, where we actually ingest diagnosis gaps, care gaps, preferred referral patterns, ADTs as well as electronic prior authorization feeds from the insurance directly into the workflow of the provider, such that they can take action on that," he said. "When you think about what Humana is doing with CenterWell it's very important for them to document the risk that they're taking to be able to provide preventative care for these senior populations, and by using our tools, they're able to actually have those insights surfaced to them such that they can take action at the moment of care."
Humana is quickly expanding its CenterWell brand, announcing plans in early 2025 to add 20 to 30 new clinics in new markets and existing markets. That expansion comes as the senior population continues to grow, becoming the largest users of healthcare, and the delivery of care is shifting from hospitals to ambulatory and community settings. At the same time, the industry is facing an ongoing physician shortage.
“Our senior population is growing and evolving—with unique and increasingly complex needs that demand a healthcare system built to meet and exceed expectations,” Segert said. “To support this, care delivery must be real-time, connected, and adaptive. By partnering with CenterWell and deploying our scalable, AI-native EHR across every CenterWell and Conviva primary care location, we’re streamlining workflows and empowering clinicians to deliver simpler, more personalized care.”
With its athenaOne platform, athenahealth is "reimagining" the EHR with AI-native capabilities that include AI-enhanced document services, interoperability tools and intelligent clinical summaries. The platform's practice and revenue cycle management capabilities are designed to reduce practices’ administrative work by more than 50%.
The company also built an ambient digital scribe inside athenaOne that automates draft notes, diagnoses and prescriptions. AthenaAmbient will enter user testing next month.
By adopting athenaOne, CenterWell aims to reduce administrative burdens for clinicians, streamline care coordination across settings and enable data-driven interventions that can enhance health outcomes and quality of life for patients, executives said.
"Our interoperability, care planning and value-based care tools are easy to use, which enables better productivity and higher levels of accessibility which then leads to better schedule density, as well, for the practices," Segert said.
Athenahealth's open platform and cloud-native athenaOne architecture enables rapid deployment of AI features, according to executives.
"One of the great things about athena is the technology was built the right way from the start. We were built on an open ecosystem, full API, single source of the code, which means every single one of our practices is literally on the same instance," Segert told Fierce Healthcare in August.
As CenterWell expands, athenahealth's EHR architecture can be rapidly deployed into new clinics, he noted.