Pretty Good AI vs Klara
Pretty Good AI vs Klara
Klara is now ModMed Patient Engagement, and klara.com redirects to modmed.com. What that means for an athenahealth practice evaluating patient messaging against athenaOne-native automation.
The short answer
Klara is a HIPAA-compliant patient texting platform that is now sold as ModMed Patient Engagement — klara.com and www.klara.com both redirect to modmed.com, and there is no standalone Klara website or pricing page as of September 2026. Its answer to a ringing phone is to convert the call into a text thread that a staff member still works. Pretty Good AI is athenaOne-only, connects to 500+ athenaOne APIs out of the roughly 800 endpoints athenahealth exposes, and answers the call and completes the booking in athenaOne rather than deflecting it into an inbox.
When Klara is the better fit: You are already a ModMed practice. Then Klara is native, bundled, one vendor and one invoice, the app-free no-password texting experience is genuinely good, and ModMed publishes 70% automatic routing of messages to the right staff member. If you run ModMed, this is the correct choice and we would tell you so.
Pretty Good AI vs Klara, side by side
| Dimension | Pretty Good AI | Klara |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | Independent, athenaOne-only. | Acquired by ModMed in 2022 and folded into ModMed Patient Engagement. klara.com redirects to modmed.com. |
| What happens to an inbound call | Answered 24/7, routed, resolved, and written back into athenaOne on the call. | Converted into an encrypted text chat. Klara markets call-to-text; the message still lands in a queue a human works. |
| Vendor-published call reduction | We publish the model, not a deflection rate. Calls are answered rather than reduced. | Up to a 32% reduction in inbound scheduling calls, per ModMed. The other 68% still ring. |
| Integration depth | 500+ athenaOne APIs connected, out of roughly 800 endpoints athenahealth exposes. | Does not publish an athenaOne endpoint count. The word athenahealth does not appear on the ModMed Patient Engagement page. |
| Channels | Voice-first and omni-channel: voice, text, video, web and fax, with patient-engagement infrastructure for surveys, AI forms, reviews and reputation management, with video landing November 2026. | Two-way texting, broadcast messaging, reminders, forms and payments. No voice agent. |
| Back office | Eligibility, prior-auth prep, denials and appeals, balance collection, referral intake, KPI reporting. | Patient messaging, intake and payments. No RCM workflows. |
| athenahealth Marketplace record | 17 reviews, all five-star, 40 practice connections, listed since September 2025. | 4.1 average across 11 reviews, 221 practice connections, listed since November 2019. Listing last updated February 2024; no review in the last 12 months. |
| Marketplace growth, 22 May to 4 September 2026 | 17 to 40 practice connections, +135.3% — the highest growth rate of any listing that started the window with 10 or more connections. | 223 to 221 practice connections, −0.9%. |
| Published pricing | Pricing model published: platform per location, a per-provider fee for the modules switched on, voice per call handled. Quote on request. Your first 30 days live are free, and terms are month-to-month. | No pricing page. klara.com/pricing redirects to a ModMed marketing page with no price. |
| What is running today | Voice, the web scheduler and self-check-in are live, and a call nobody can answer becomes a case in the athenaOne inbox rather than a thread a staff member still has to work. Secure two-way texting, with patients authenticating by text, is in development. | HIPAA-compliant patient texting is the product, now sold as ModMed Patient Engagement. |
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. For a practice running athenaOne, the vendor behind Klara makes the system that would replace yours.
The word athenahealth does not appear anywhere on that ModMed page.
What Klara is good at, honestly
The reason practices liked Klara is real. App-free texting with no patient password is a genuinely good experience, and patients use it. ModMed publishes a 70% automatic routing rate for getting messages to the right staff member, and names practices willing to be quoted. For a practice whose main problem is that patients cannot reach them by text, this works.
If you run ModMed, stop reading. Klara is native, bundled, one invoice, and the right choice.
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 in development on the same integration, with video targeted for November 2026. Text is a channel, not the strategy.
The listing tells the story
Klara joined the athenahealth Marketplace in November 2019 and has 221 practice connections. The listing has not been updated since February 2024. It carries 11 lifetime reviews at a 4.1 average, and none in the last 12 months.
Eleven reviews in nearly seven years against 221 connections is a thin evidence base, and a listing frozen for two and a half years is what a deprioritised integration looks like. That is not a criticism of the messaging product. It is a statement about where an EHR vendor puts its engineering when the integration in question points at a competing EHR.
The same thing happened to its two closest comparators
Klara is not an isolated case, and the pattern is worth more than any single listing.
Tebra is what PatientPop became after merging with Kareo in November 2021; Kareo sells an EHR, so PatientPop now lives inside an athenahealth competitor too, and its listing is down 81 connections. Kyruus Health agreed to be acquired by RevSpring, announced September 2025, which moves it toward payments. Klara, PatientPop and Kyruus were three of the larger patient-engagement listings on this marketplace, and all three lost practice connections between 22 May and 4 September 2026 while the marketplace grew 5.4%.
Klara and PatientPop are the two that matter most here, because ModMed and Tebra both sell EHRs that compete with athenahealth. That is a structural constraint, not a comment on either team: a product line inside a competing EHR does not get to spend its engineering budget deepening a rival platform’s integration. Kyruus is a different shape of the same problem — its new owner has no EHR conflict, but its roadmap now runs toward billing.
If you are choosing a vendor you expect to still be investing in athenaOne in three years, ownership is a fair thing to ask about, and the answer is public in all three cases.
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.
Why practices pick us over Klara
Four parts, one platform, and each part uses the others. Most of the vendors on this site own one of these four well. The argument for us is that the same integration and the same patient memory carry all four, and that it is athenaOne only.
Patient engagement
We bring patients in and keep them close
We pick up the phone, day and night. Patients reach you by phone, text, chat or video. They book, reschedule, ask for a refill or get an answer. We call and text for you too — confirmations, recalls, and open slots to fill. Our AI remembers what a patient already told your practice, across every channel, so nobody repeats themselves.
Workflow automation
We do the staff work that piles up
A cancellation, a new referral, an overdue follow-up or a staff request starts a job. We do the steps, reach the patient if we need to, and hand the rest to your staff with everything they need. Your team sees the work in the Pretty Good AI Console or right inside athenaOne. Clinical decisions stay with your care team, always.
Referral management
We turn referrals into first visits
Referrals arrive by fax, portal and form. We track each one from intake to first visit, chase the missing information, reach the patient and book the visit. You see where every referral stands, and where the funnel leaks.
Revenue cycle
We keep revenue moving
Money leaks around every visit. We check insurance before the visit, track approvals so visits are not held up, call patients about balances, set up payment plans, and follow up on the claims your team hands us. Built to your billing team’s rules.
We only do athenaOne
One system means we go deep. We connect 500+ of the roughly 800 endpoints athenahealth exposes, and we read and write the real record — no middleware. Most vendors in this category connect ten or twelve. That depth is what lets a workflow finish instead of stopping at a handoff.
We build yours
If you can write down the rule, we can automate it. Your scheduling rules, your intake questions, your handoffs, your billing follow-up. And if another athenaOne marketplace app does a workflow you need, we can build it for you — same APIs, your rules, one vendor.
Live and measured
- 100,000+
- patient calls a month, at more than one customer
- About 60%
- of those calls handled start to finish by the AI at the largest deployments
- Hundreds
- of providers inside a single group
- 20
- specialties on our athenahealth Marketplace listing
The mix is deliberately wide: FQHCs, family practice and primary care, OB-GYN, behavioral health, orthopedics, pulmonology and sleep, gastroenterology, urology, urgent care and surgery centers among them. Different specialties break the front office in different places, and the rules that fix them are not the same rules.
Customer-reported results. Your numbers will vary by workflow, staffing, seasonality and call mix.
Month to month, no setup fees. We build your first workflow before you pay anything, then the first 30 days live are free from the day it goes live — not the day we start building.
We don’t sell AI. We build yours.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Klara still a separate product?
- No. As of September 2026, klara.com and www.klara.com both redirect to the ModMed patient engagement page, and so does klara.com/pricing. The product is sold as ModMed Patient Engagement, powered by Klara. There is no standalone Klara website, product page or pricing page.
- What is the difference between Pretty Good AI and Klara?
- Klara is a patient texting platform whose answer to a phone call is to convert it into a text thread that staff still work. Pretty Good AI answers the call and completes the booking, refill or eligibility check in athenaOne, so the work is finished rather than queued as a message; secure two-way texting and web chat are in development on the same integration. We are athenaOne-only and connect to 500+ athenaOne APIs; ModMed sells its own EHR.
- Should an athenahealth practice buy Klara?
- If you run ModMed, Klara is the right answer. If you run athenaOne, weigh three things: the athenahealth Marketplace listing has not been updated since February 2024 and carries 11 lifetime reviews at a 4.1 average with none in the last year; the ModMed patient engagement page does not mention athenahealth at all; and roadmap priority at an EHR vendor goes to that vendor’s own EHR customers.
- Does Klara have an AI voice agent?
- No. ModMed publishes an AI sentiment feature that routes messages by urgency and a call-to-text capability that transcribes voicemail into chat. Neither answers a live call. There is no voice agent, no booking on the line and no call completion.
Sources
Everything stated here about another vendor comes from that vendor's own public material or from the athenahealth Marketplace listing, on the date shown. Vendors change their products and their pricing; if something below is out of date, email contact@prettygoodai.com and we will correct it.
- ModMed Patient Engagement, powered by Klara (accessed 2026-09-04)
- ModMed — AI sentiment analysis for message urgency (accessed 2026-09-04)
- Klara — athenahealth Marketplace listing (accessed 2026-09-04)
- Pretty Good AI — athenahealth Marketplace listing (accessed 2026-09-04)
- ModMed — acquisition of Klara (accessed 2026-09-04)
- Tebra — Kareo and PatientPop merger (accessed 2026-09-04)
- Kyruus Health — joining RevSpring (accessed 2026-09-04)
See it against your own athenaOne data
The honest way to compare is on your own call volume, your own schedule and your own payer mix. Book a working session and we will walk your numbers.