CareTeam Enables Whole-patient Care Approach with Athenahealth EHR

CareTeam is a primary care organization that partners with employers to operate on-site, near-site and shared-site clinics for employees. It takes a personalized approach to care, as well as a whole-patient approach.

For example, its clinics’ providers also are certified health coaches who help patients develop personalized preventative care plans. This approach to care enables employees to schedule comprehensive appointments for anything from sick visits to annual exams, and allows for significant cost savings when it comes to insurance plan costs for both employers and individual employees.

THE PROBLEM

“About three-and-a-half years ago, we were looking to further scale our business across myriad, diverse markets, and were searching for a cloud-based EHR for multiple reasons,” said Scott Parks, president and co-founder of CareTeam. “First, knowing that quick implementation promotes scalability, we needed a system that we could implement quickly across multiple locations.

“We also wanted to better coordinate patient care across our multiple clinics and gain visibility into overall practice management and performance,” he continued. “Because our clinics operate in both rural and urban communities, the ability to access patient data quickly and efficiently in one place via an EHR was imperative to our growth.”

Additionally, CareTeam places a heavy focus on addressing patients’ whole health.

“We aim to improve their mental and physical well-being and lifestyle habits through our behavioral health specialists and nutrition counselors,” Parks noted. “To achieve this, we also needed an EHR that simplified access to patient data to better inform holistic care, and could help us better engage patients in their care.

“We turned to athenahealth to help us grow and assist with improving operations at our clinics across the nation,” he continued. “At the time, we were operating five clinics. Now we’ve grown to 22 clinics.”

Additionally, working with athenahealth allowed CareTeam to advance its whole-patient approach to care, which was pushed to the forefront amid the pandemic as COVID-19 placed a greater focus on the importance of effectively treating comorbidities.

PROPOSAL

The ability to access the EHR from anywhere and the visibility into performance and practice operations was imperative to the business model’s success, Parks explained.

“Implementing athenahealth would equip us to quickly scale our practice nationally,” he said. “Additionally, the vendor’s [cloud-based] product would operate much more efficiently than an on-premise solution and we could avoid the hassle of managing server rooms and onsite IT specialists.

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