Athenahealth announces new AI features for EHR platform

The race to add AI capabilities to EHRs is heating up, with athenahealth following Oracle Health's recent AI-powered ambulatory EHR debut with an announcement of its own. The company will integrate new AI features into its ambulatory EHR, which will be rolled out in the coming months.

Athenahealth will add several AI features to its athenaOne EHR platform for ambulatory care practices, including generative AI (GenAI) and AI enhancements to existing capabilities. For instance, the platform already automates document processing, using machine learning to read large volumes of faxes and add them to the patient chart. Now, the platform will leverage AI to label clinical, imaging and administrative documents as they are saved to the chart.

Additionally, athenahealth is piloting a new feature: the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The MCP server, available on athenaOne platform APIs, enables standardized communication between AI models and the athenaOne platform. According to the company, this feature will analyze disparate data sources across practices, hospitals, public health registries, payers and more, to extract clinical insights and provide them at the point of care.

The company emphasized its focus on interoperability following its recent migration of approximately 160,000 providers to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) network.

"We are building the future, using intelligent interoperability to methodically break down the walled gardens that have constrained independent practices for more than a decade," said Paul Brient, chief product officer at athenahealth, in the press release. "By layering custom-built, AI-enabled solutions onto our industry-leading approach to interoperability, we're making the promise of interoperability a reality."

Athenahealth is also testing capabilities that provide AI-generated summaries of medical documents, patient charts and clinical events and an AI-enabled assistant that uses GenAI to search across clinical data to answer questions or generate summaries about significant information in the patient's history.

Further, athenahealth is embedding AI into revenue cycle processes, automating insurance selection and offering AI support for accurate coding.

"At athenahealth, we've spent decades helping clinicians navigate the increasing complexities they face every day in their practices," said Bob Segert, chairman and CEO at athenahealth, in the news release. "Rapid advances in AI are now allowing us to reimagine the clinician and practice experience, solve previously unsolvable problems, and bring back the human side of healthcare."

The athenahealth announcement follows not only Oracle Health's AI-driven EHR debut but also a report by Politico that Epic is gearing up to unveil an AI-powered clinical documentation tool at its annual user group meeting next week.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.