Pretty Good AI vs Klara

Check the URL first

Type klara.com into a browser today and you land on modmed.com. So does www.klara.com, and so does klara.com/pricing. Verified 3 September 2026: all three are permanent redirects to the ModMed patient engagement page.

That is not a branding detail. Klara was acquired by ModMed in 2022 and now exists as a feature name, ModMed Patient Engagement, powered by Klara. ModMed sells its own EHR, so where athenaOne sits in the integration roadmap is a fair diligence question.

The word athenahealth does not appear anywhere on that ModMed page.

What Klara is good at, honestly

App-free texting with no patient password removes a real barrier, and ModMed publishes a 70% automatic routing rate for getting messages to the right staff member. Routing a message to the right person is not the same as the work being done, which is the line this whole comparison sits on.

If you run ModMed, that pairing is already decided: Klara is native and bundled on one invoice. The rest of this page is for athenaOne practices.

The mechanic that decides this comparison

Here is ModMed’s own description of what Klara does with a phone call:

Call-to-text. Convert calls and transcribed voicemails into encrypted text chats.

That is the whole thing. A call arrives, and Klara turns it into a message. The message goes into an inbox. A person works the inbox.

Even the vendor’s best published outcome is a 32% reduction in inbound scheduling calls. Two thirds of the calls still ring, and every deflected one becomes a thread somebody has to close.

We took the opposite approach. The call gets answered. The patient books, reschedules, asks for a refill or checks a balance, and the result is written into athenaOne before they hang up. Secure two-way texting for the patients who prefer to type is live on the same integration. Text is a channel, not the strategy.

The listing tells the story

Klara joined the athenahealth Marketplace in November 2019 and had 221 practice connections with a 4.1 average across 11 reviews as of September 2026. The listing has not been updated since February 2024.

Eleven reviews in nearly seven years against 221 connections is a thin evidence base to evaluate on. Whether an athenaOne integration gets sustained engineering attention inside a group that sells its own EHR is a roadmap question worth asking ModMed directly.

Beyond messaging

The other gap is scope. Klara covers the conversation. It does not touch what happens around it:

• Referral intake by fax and email, a provider referral portal, referral status tracking
• Waitlist backfill, no-show recovery, lapsed-patient reactivation, provider-departure rescheduling
• Eligibility and insurance verification, prior-auth status and preparation, denials and appeals
• Patient balance collection, payment links and plans
• Per-call QA scoring, KPI dashboards, outcome calls

Those run on the same athenaOne integration as the phone, which is why they can be bought as modules rather than as a second vendor.

What we would tell you to check

Ask ModMed when the athenahealth integration was last given engineering time, and what the roadmap looks like for practices that will never buy the ModMed EHR. Ask us for a live call that ends with athenaOne updated and no staff task created. Then compare what each of us does with the call nobody wanted to take.