Virtual and At-Home Care
Product Usage: Cal.com is predominantly used for scheduling appointments, sending confirmations and reminders, as well as hosting telehealth visits.
Strengths: The main strengths are its user-friendly interface, HIPAA compliance, and ability to manage different time zones.
Weaknesses: The main concerns circle around its payment system, bugs with rescheduling and cancellations, and the inability to send automated texts without a double opt-in.
Overall Judgment: While Cal.com has proven to be useful given the scale of operations, improvements related to bug fixes and the payment system are crucial for future scalability.
Product Usage: Validic was used for collecting and standardizing data from various health devices like Apple Watch, FitBit, and blood pressure cuffs, thereby helping the user keep track of their health data more efficiently.
Strengths: Validic provides excellent device coverage, good uptime, a very clear and robust API, and robust technical support.
Weaknesses: Due to Validic’s model, when a device includes a new sensor or data, clients have to wait for Validic to update their system causing delays; additionally, the service can be relatively expensive.
Overall Judgment: Validic is good at what they do, providing support, solid uptime, and expansive device coverage, making it a worthy investment in contrast to building a similar solution internally.
Product Usage: The primary use case is tracking sales information, logging calls, meetings, and prospecting activities; Salesforce is also used for dashboarding and reporting, partnership management, admissions and intake process, verification of benefits, and post-treatment care.
Strengths: Salesforce’s strengths lie in its flexibility to handle various types of data and workflows, the ability to automate reporting, sending notifications and emails based on triggers, and its ability to integrate with numerous systems.
Weaknesses: The product’s weaknesses include limitations in visualization, dashboarding, and complex reporting, and a dated user interface; furthermore, too much flexibility can lead to a bloat with features and functionalities.
Overall Judgment: Despite some drawbacks, Salesforce is a valuable tool for managing a wide range of processes within the company, from sales tracking to patient admissions and intake, making it a favorable choice.
Product Usage: The product is used by healthcare providers for scheduling, consultations, telehealth appointments, claims billing, and member data management.Strengths: The strength is its API that performed well with 700 endpoints, enabling customization and enhancement by the company’s engineering team.Weaknesses: Weaknesses include problems with Careequality integration and occasional errors in API documentation that do not match returned data. Overall Judgement: Despite minor issues, the product is seen as a good fit for the company’s needs, providing the flexibility required for a unique digital healthcare model.
Product Usage: The VP of Operations uses Axle Health for coordinating schedules of patients, mobile resources, and remote clinicians, and also for optimizing routes considering drive times for their pediatrics organization.
Strengths: Axle Health is touted for its efficiency in matching up drive time in a mobile resource with a fixed remote resource, in-built NPS surveys and reporting features, user-friendly interface, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility in adding licenses.
Weaknesses: The VP pointed out that the current version of Axle Health assumes that bookings are made by patients leading to their clinicians needing to enter patient details manually each time, however, this issue seems to be getting addressed.
Overall Judgement: Despite minor workflow alignment issues, Axle Health has been beneficial for their work, providing high patient satisfaction, reliability, exceptional customer support and hence would be chosen again if given the opportunity.
Product Usage: The product is used for automating data collection of custom intake questionnaires, facilitating virtual visits, and remote patient monitoring.
Strengths: The product’s affordability and quick setup due to its existing marketplace relationship with athenahealth are its main strengths.
Weaknesses: The product has functionality limitations, struggles with reliability especially for the virtual visit feature, and could utilize API connectivity with athenahealth better.
Overall Judgment: The product does not fully meet the company’s needs in terms of reliability and integration with athenahealth, and it may not have been the best choice compared to potentially better vendors in the market.
Product Usage: Doxy.me is used as the main telehealth platform for this fully virtual mental health provider company, hosting therapy and medication management sessions.
Strengths: Doxy.me offers a simple, user-friendly interface with a quick implementation process, reliable platform stability, and useful features such as waiting rooms, easy link generation, and modifiable connection settings.
Weaknesses: Shortcomings include limited integration possibilities, the inability to attach files, messages, or call transcripts to patient charts directly, and capacity constraints on group therapy sessions (maximum of 11 participants).
Overall Judgment: Doxy.me was the right decision at the time and it has proven to be a reliable and easy-to-use telehealth platform, with its simplicity as a notable strength.
Product Usage: The product is used for conducting virtual visits with patients, sending notifications when patients enter waiting rooms, sharing screen for patient education, and messaging within the app.
Strengths: The product is praised for its ease of use, reliability, intuitive features, and simplicity in onboarding new users.
Weaknesses: A major weakness is the lack of integration with the EMR or other systems, which increases cognitive load for providers by necessitating the use of a separate platform.
Overall Judgment: The product has been effective and beneficial, particularly for new providers and in enhancing time management and patient education, though room for improvement exists particularly in its integration with other platforms.
Product Usage: Salesforce Health Cloud is used to provide a care management platform intended to support various user types (network development, health coach, account executive), integrate workflows and enable shared data models.
Strengths: The platform’s primary strengths are its high customization potential and extended application ecosystem, allowing users to build around or expand upon standard Salesforce objects.
Weaknesses: There’s a risk of building oneself into a corner through over-customization, and there’s a challenge of potentially running out of custom objects, space, or hitting API limits if one hasn’t had prior experience with Salesforce.f.
Overall Judgment: The decision to use Salesforce Health Cloud is deemed to be correct; its flexibility has allowed the client to build a robust care management and sales management platform.
Product Usage: The medical group uses athenahealth’s Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) tool for billing CPT codes, claim review, and claim submissions.
Strengths: athenahealth is a well-known platform with an automated claims processing system, compliance updates, easy usability, and integrated EMR.
Weaknesses: It is not customizable to complex billing nuances, not ideal for concierge practices or non-CMS billing guidelines followers, and it is relatively costly.
Overall Judgment: The medical group is satisfied with its decision to retain athenahealth due to its familiarity, CMS compliance and integrations, despite its high cost and inflexibility to complex billing routines.
Product Usage: Getlabs is primarily used by the company for home phlebotomy services, with an additional focus on improving laboratory test completion rates and enhancing patient convenience.
Strengths: Getlabs offers reasonable pricing, satisfactory geographic coverage, a consistently expanding service range, good collaboration and responsiveness, and employs W2 staff.
Weaknesses: Getlabs has limited coverage in rural areas, has shown weak interoperability and integration knowledge, and their white-label product is not fully customizable.
Overall Judgment: Despite mentioned weaknesses, the company is pleased with Getlabs’ services and believes it to be a strong player in the home phlebotomy market, owing to its focus on expansion and patient-oriented services.
Product Usage: The product is being used as a source of clinical truth for patients, documenting meaningful patient care delivered, chat encounters, and submitting $0 claims for compliance purposes in value-based contracts.
Strengths: Athenahealth’s strengths include its extensive features, built-in Revenue Cycle Management support, and certain specialty-specific capabilities.
Weaknesses: The main weaknesses of Athenahealth are poor API performance, lack of prompt support for clients on lower-priced plans, and the cumbersome and time-consuming solution validation process.
Overall Judgment: The user experiences frustration with Athenahealth’s service model, but acknowledges that some trade-offs may become worthwhile once billing through Athenahealth begins in earnest.
Product Usage: The company has incorporated Athena for over a year as an integrated EMR and RCM solution that eliminates the need for multiple vendors and is popular within independent primary care practices.
Strengths: Athena is a comprehensive system whose clinical inbox structure is effective, offers an adequate API capability, and nightly backend data syncing via Snowflake.
Weaknesses: Athena’s data migration process and its API documentation are weak points, alongside a lack of real-time event notifications on patient chart changes, and the system requires creating duplicate user accounts for clinicians working across departments.
Overall Judgment: Athena is fairly satisfactory but not exceptional, with challenges linked to building on top of it and getting approvals for API use, and would likely be used for existing clinics but might be replaced with a more manageable product for expansion into new areas.
Product Usage: The user leveraged Athena for various operations excluding patient scheduling (handled by Phreesia) and patient care management tasks (handled by ActiveCampaign).
Strengths: Athena offered an excellent sandbox environment for testing and its user interface was considered more intuitive compared to competitors like Epic.
Weaknesses: The user found it challenging to work with Athena’s APIs due to incomplete documentation, and getting support with these issues was difficult.
Overall Judgment: While Athena was suitable for the company’s needs as a brick-and-mortar practice, the user questions the additional value gained from building custom apps on top of it.
Product Usage: Athena’s EHR is being utilized by the medical assistants in the clinic to manage tasks such as checking patients in/out, scheduling appointments, uploading and pulling reports among others. The providers mainly use it to document patient visits and approve orders.
Strengths: Athena has a robust API, allowing system manipulations without touching the user interface, and it includes an integrated eFax system that manages the sorting and assignment of faxed documents.
Weaknesses: There is an excessive number of clicks required for charting and templates provided are not efficient as they are. The user interface for certain features also seems outdated.
Overall Judgment: Despite certain drawbacks, Athena’s EHR would likely still be in use in two years barring any major issues like price increases, large networks moving away from it, or the shutdown of core features. A significant improvement in other EHRs could also lead to a switch.
