The athenaOne Workflow Catalog: Every Workflow We Run Today

Our opening line to most practices is that if you can describe a workflow, we can automate it. That is true, and said on its own it makes us sound like a consultancy that will disappear into a scoping exercise for a quarter.

So here is the other half of the sentence. Twenty-nine named workflows, running today across eight parts of an athenaOne front office, plus three properties that apply to all of them. Nothing on this page is a roadmap item. If a workflow is listed here, it is live somewhere, and you can ask to hear a real call of it.

The reason we can say yes to an unusual workflow is underneath the list rather than in it: production access to 820+ athenaOne APIs. Depth across the whole system is what makes a specific, awkward, local workflow buildable at all, rather than only the four or five workflows a narrower product was designed around.

Patient communication

How patients reach you, and what gets finished when they do.

Incoming calls. Answers every incoming call on the first ring. Books new and established patients, handles refill requests, answers the questions your front desk answers forty times a day such as procedure prep instructions, takes messages, and escalates to a person when the call needs one.

Secure two-way text. Two-way texting between patients and the practice on the same athenaOne integration as the phone line. Confirmations, prep questions and scheduling changes are handled in the thread; anything needing a person is handed to staff with the history attached. Patients authenticate by text, so it stays secure without pushing them into the portal.

After-hours coverage. When staff are unavailable, the agent follows your after-hours protocol: finish what it can finish, escalate to the on-call provider where your protocol says to, write the message to the chart as a case, or tell the caller when to call back.

Billing and balance calls. Inbound billing calls get routed and answered. Outbound balance calls get made. Balances surface before scheduling, so the money conversation happens before the visit instead of six weeks after it, and payment can be taken by secure link on the call.

Voicemail to case. When a call cannot be answered live, the agent collects name, date of birth and reason for calling and writes it to the patient’s chart as a case. Staff work it from an athenaOne inbox rather than from a voicemail box nobody has checked since Thursday.

Referral management

Every intake channel landing in one review queue.

Fax referral intake. Ingests inbound referral faxes and drafts the chart, with a confidence score, patient matching and de-duplication, follow-up on missing information, and a hold-for-review step wherever you want a human eye. Handwritten faxes included.

Provider referral forms. A web form built to your specification and hosted on your site, so referring offices submit directly instead of faxing. Submissions land in the same queue as the faxes.

Patient self-referrals. A form for patients who arrive without a referring provider. It captures what is needed to open a chart, routes through the same review, and hands to the web scheduler once accepted.

Campaign referrals. The self-referral form as a standalone landing page, one link per campaign, so a service-line launch or a community event can be measured by scheduled patients rather than by clicks.

Referral dashboard. Fax, web and phone referrals in one queue with status and age, surfacing the ones that have stalled on missing information, an unreachable patient, or a review nobody picked up.

Web scheduling and check-in

Web scheduler. A scheduler built around your rules rather than one your practice has to bend around. It collects demographics, creates the chart and books the visit for new patients, and it runs the same rules the voice agent runs, so a patient on the phone can be sent a form to complete while the agent walks them through it.

Self-check-in. Consent forms, intake questionnaires, insurance updates and outcome measures completed before arrival instead of at the window, with reminders to finish them.

Keeping the schedule full

Waitlist. Calls waitlisted patients when a matching slot opens, works the list in order, and retries the ones who do not pick up.

Appointment acceleration. Pulls booked patients into earlier openings, following your rules on provider and visit-type matching, notice periods, acceleration limits and authorization windows.

Auto-rescheduling. When a provider blocks out days or leaves, reaches affected patients by call or text to rebook, and recognizes why they are calling when they call back, so a returned call picks up rather than starting over.

Cancellation recovery. When a patient cancels without rebooking, offers the next times that fit their original visit type and provider. Patients who decline or do not answer go back to staff rather than being called forever, and the freed slot goes to the waitlist in parallel.

Outbound outreach

Patients who are due but not on the schedule.

Tickler-driven scheduling. Works the future-care reminders your staff already set in athenaOne, calling patients to book as they come due. The tickler cancels itself once the patient is scheduled.

Orders-driven scheduling. Books straight from open orders without waiting for a tickler, and translates the order into words a patient recognizes rather than the internal code.

Lost to care. Reactivates patients who have fallen off the schedule entirely, against a list you define by time since last visit, condition or provider panel.

Equipment adherence outreach. Uses remote monitoring data to find patients whose equipment use is below the threshold your practice sets, calls them, answers the common logistics questions, and transfers to staff or flags a callback.

Appointment prep calls. Calls ahead of the visit to confirm, remind about outstanding tasks such as an insurance update or an unfinished outcome measure, and give patients an easy moment to say they cannot make it. That is the whole value: days of notice instead of an empty chair.

Post-visit follow-up. Calls after the visit and asks the question set your practice supplies, writing the patient’s own answers back to the chart for staff to read. The agent records what the patient said. It does not interpret it.

Surveys and reviews. Sends a survey at check-out, invites the patients who respond well to leave a public review, and flags the ones who do not for staff. Responses attach to the visit they came from, so you can read satisfaction by provider, location and visit type instead of as one practice-wide number.

Prior authorization

Submission prep. Compiles the full submission and flags what is missing early, before it reaches your authorization team, configured per payer so each submission carries what that payer actually wants.

Status tracking. Pulls prior-auth and claim status from payer portals, including no-auth-required and out-of-state benefit checks, and writes it back to athenaOne so staff read it in the chart instead of logging into six portals in turn.

This is the group where the outside world is moving underneath everyone. Practices complete about 40 prior authorizations per physician per week and spend 13 hours a week on them, and 40% of physicians report having staff who work on nothing else (2025 AMA prior authorization physician survey). CMS has set implementation dates for impacted payers on certain prior-authorization provisions from January 1, 2026, with the API requirements landing primarily on January 1, 2027 (CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization final rule, CMS-0057-F). Neither of those changes what a practice has to do this month, which is why the two workflows above exist in their current form.

Inside athenaOne

Forms. Complete patient forms without leaving athenaOne: FMLA, school and work notes, disability paperwork. The draft pulls from the chart, every value stays editable in staff review, and the finished form attaches to the record or exports as a PDF.

Family navigator. Finds related family members so staff jump between charts without searching, and shows a combined household balance so the front desk collects once rather than three times.

Analytics

Practice report. A snapshot built from your own data covering utilization, cancellation and no-show rates by provider and location, with revenue, diagnosis, procedure, claim and payer-mix trends. It is free and carries no obligation, and it is usually the fastest way to find out whether any of this is worth your time.

KPI dashboard. Custom views of the operation, historical and forward-looking, for managing capacity and getting ahead of bottlenecks such as referral leakage or appointments falling outside the authorization window.

Three properties that apply to everything above

10 languages. The full administrative call runs in English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and Dutch, with the same workflows in each. Staff see the original transcript beside an English translation, and cases the agent creates are translated too, so an English-speaking front desk can act on them. More languages can be enabled on request with testing time against your real callers.

Command Center. One place to see and steer everything the agent does, with a full transcript and outcome for every call and message, plus outbound work, KPIs and practice settings such as office hours, holiday closures and provider availability.

Security and compliance. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audit reports are available on request. The Pretty Good AI platform has attained HITRUST i1 certification. Pretty Good AI signs a HIPAA business associate agreement before any patient data is touched, and every call, message and case is logged with a full transcript, so what the agent said and did is auditable by you at any time.

What the list does not tell you

A catalog is a fair way to compare scope and a bad way to predict whether something will work in your building. The reason is that every entry above meets your practice’s own rules the moment it goes live, and those rules are stranger than any feature list.

One example, from a real account, anonymized. A practice consolidated its entire appointment-type catalog overnight. Cosmetic types, two biopsy durations, cryotherapy and the generic procedure type were all retired in athenaOne and folded into a single follow-up type. Nobody told us, and there is no reason they would have; it was an internal scheduling decision.

The surviving type was fifteen minutes. A forty-five-minute service now had nowhere to go, and the practice still wanted the specific service name carried through as the reason for visit, which the consolidation had just removed the obvious route to.

What the automation did was refuse to guess. Booking requests hitting a type that no longer mapped stopped and routed to staff with the context attached, rather than quietly dropping a forty-five-minute service into a fifteen-minute slot and creating a problem that surfaces at the front desk three weeks later. The fix was a remap agreed with the practice rather than assumed: keep the retired types internally, map them deliberately onto fifteen and thirty-minute equivalents, carry the original service name through. Our engineer’s note back asked for a heads-up next time, because an appointment-type catalog is a shared dependency.

That is the honest shape of this work. The catalog is the starting position. The handoff to a human on the case the rules do not cover is not a gap in the product, it is the product behaving correctly.

Where the workflow is not in the catalog

Most practices we talk to name at least one workflow that is not on this page, and it is usually the one costing them the most, because it is specific to how they run.

That is the normal case, not the exception. We map the workflow your staff already run and automate that. We do not ask you to re-cut your scheduling conventions, your intake process or your queue structure to match a product’s opinion of how a practice should work. New workflow scope is measured in days and weeks, not quarters, and because onboarding already runs for weeks, a workflow identified during onboarding usually ships inside that same window.

The depth is what makes that possible. Access across the breadth of athenaOne, rather than a narrow wedge of it, is the difference between a workflow being buildable and a workflow being a feature request. Reading real slot availability and appointment-type eligibility, for instance, runs through endpoints such as GET /v1/{practiceid}/appointments/open and GET /v1/{practiceid}/appointmenttypes; waitlist work runs through GET /v1/{practiceid}/appointments/waitlist; order-driven outreach reads GET /v1/{practiceid}/patients/{patientid}/documents/order. Most vendors in this market pick a narrower wedge and build deeply inside it, which is a reasonable strategy and a real constraint on what they can say yes to.

Two boundaries that do not move

Clinical decisions stay with your care team. Every workflow above is administrative. Booking a visit, chasing a form, preparing a submission, writing a patient’s own words into the chart. Nothing in the list assesses a patient or decides what care is appropriate, and nothing in it is a substitute for a nurse or a physician.

A rule nobody can state cannot be automated. When two experienced schedulers handle the same case differently and neither can explain why, that is a decision your practice has to make. We can find it in your booking data and put it in front of you. We cannot make it for you.

Where to go next

If one group on this page is obviously your problem, start there. Referral intake automation covers the fax-to-first-visit path in more detail, and recovering unused provider capacity covers the waitlist and acceleration side.

If the workflow you need is not in the list, that is the conversation worth having, and what building one athenaOne workflow actually involves walks through three accounts of exactly that, including the stages that stalled.