Athenahealth, Inc

Challenge

With a broadly distributed workforce, athenahealth’s Global Security & Services team has relied on OnSolve Critical Communications for six years to alert staff of critical events ranging from impending severe weather, civil disturbances, travel disruptions, and public health emergencies, throughout its global footprint. athenahealth takes an all-hazards approach to their safety and security mission, necessitating a solution it can count on every day.

The task of maintaining employee safety assumed magnified importance in 2020, as the team’s purview greatly expanded when COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency. The team had been tracking the outbreak and within 24 hours of athenahealth deciding to move to remote work, 98 percent of "athenistas”, as they call themselves, were able to continue operations from their home. This migration essentially extended the organization’s footprint from several offices in the U.S. and India to thousands of residences across the globe – each with their own unique risk profile.

Solution

Combined with athenahealth’s Global Security Operations Center monitoring risks to the workforce, OnSolve provided athenahealth with a simple answer for critical communications, enabling the company to rapidly alert remote and onsite employees and activate the necessary resources and teams to address threats or emergency situations. Broadened Duty of Care: Greater Visibility into Safety and Status of more than 5,700 Onsite and Remote Employees By using the OnSolve platform, athenahealth’s senior decision-makers could send targeted, personalized messages and simple surveys that track responses in real time, improving the interaction between managers and team members who were not located in the same areas. Verifying safety during critical events, such as severe weather impacting its many Southeastern U.S.-based teams, throughout a highly active hurricane season coupled with a worldwide rise in COVID-19 cases, created greater visibility into the health and safety of potentially impacted employees. Business Resiliency Amid COVID-19: Contact Tracing, Wellness Checks, Shift Scheduling Tasked with communicating vital public health information to employees – some of which are shift-based, essential workers – regarding increases in local COVID-19 cases and associated infectious disease mitigation protocols, athenahealth’s Global Security Team leveraged plans already in place to address shift changes during severe weather. Critical team managers used their access to OnSolve’s simple interface to engage employees as new COVID-19 safety measures were announced impacting work scheduling. This allowed leaders to contact select teams in a tailored manner, leverage existing message templates, and ultimately ensure employees would understand and trust the information they were receiving when it mattered most. Simple Integration Supports Business Resilience: Multi-Hazard Preparedness

The solution’s web services Application Programming Interface (API) also enables it to be seamlessly integrated with additional third-party and internal systems used by athenahealth’s Global Security Operations Center for business continuity planning, incident management, and workforce management needs. Starting in 2021, athenahealth’s Crisis Managers will also be able to sync OnSolve Critical Communications to existing business operations, so if the company experiences a hazard related to their critical operational infrastructure, they are prepared to efficiently communicate with the right teams from any location.

Results

OnSolve empowers athenahealth leaders to successfully navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, while keeping operations running and a newly distributed workforce safe. Specifically, OnSolve Critical Communications enables athenahealth with:

• A trusted, reliable line of communication between leaders and employees working remotely;
• Expanded alerting for business continuity planning, keeping the company ahead of potential risks to their operations; and
• Vital insights into trends in employee wellness – helping to shape the organization’s operational and cultural response to the pandemic.

More about athenahealth

athenahealth partners with medical organizations across the country to drive clinical and financial results. Our vision is to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all, and we are pursuing this through our medical record, revenue cycle, patient engagement, and care coordination service offerings. Our expert teams build modern technology on an open, connected ecosystem, yielding insights that make a difference for our customers and their patients. For more information, please visit www.athenahealth.com.