athenaIDX Reviews

Summary: Avoid this company at all costs. They're stuck in the 1980s at best. I can't imagine that you would do worse with anything else, Epic, Centricity (Managed by Unlimited Systems, not the Centricity that branched into AthenaIDX), Unlimited Financials, literally anything else would be better.

Positive: It looks like it's not awful.
There might be a use case for a small practice that only manages one location with low patient load? But it's priced like enterprise software.

Negative: Inability to scale:
Every location has to be built by Athena custom with a 120 day lead time. There is no way to make changes that apply everywhere without coding in an ancient language made in 1966 and last updated in 1995 (MUMPS). Users must be individually created in two separate locations and then manually within each environment. Athena can 'wipe, clean and recreate' an environment that duplicates an environment, but this process is rife with errors and is not reliable. It also requires specifically contacting Athena to have done. Modern systems don't have this problem.

Out of date backend:
Your organization will need to have developers who are familiar with a wildly out of date coding language in order to take advantage of their customization options using a 1970's style pre-DOS command prompt.

Reporting is also out of date and requires accessing a second IDX exclusive program:
Do you like Power BI? Too bad, you're using the Windows 95 era reporting suite housed in a separate website with separate user lists and permissions from the IDX program itself. Additionally, getting any modern reporting to work at scale is a herculean effort due to non-conformity in setup on Athena's end. Their SQL backend is a nightmare.

Staff are either incapable or incompetent and take no responsibility:
Many of the staff cannot make meaningful changes. It's clear that the program has been built by people who left long ago and the remaining people have no real idea of how to make changes to modernize the program. The staff wasn't familiar with Single Sign On authentication, the security standard that's been around for nearly 25 years. Staff said that Single Sign On was ready for rollout but didn't have it set up until weeks after software was rolled out. We deal with hundreds of vendors and this company is by far the worst from a capability, a modernization and competence standpoint.

Support pricing:
They're open 8-5 EST -- anything outside of that time is off hours support which starts at $1200 for the first hour and $250 for all hours after that.

There are so many other things that this program gets wrong between being out of date and being set up by people with no standards who take no responsibility. We manage 50+ applications and this one is by far the worst we've ever seen.