EmergeOrtho Case Study: Quick ROI With Patient Access AI

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Customer Story

date

February 20, 2026

Stephen Dean

Stephen Dean

Case Study: EmergeOrtho Triangle

How a Large Orthopedic Practice Integrated Keona with Athenahealth Without Slowing Down Their Call Center

A real-world look at how a high-volume orthopedic practice used Keona and Athenahealth together to streamline scheduling, improve data access, and scale through COVID without adding operational friction.

Customer Snapshot

Practice Type

Large, multi-specialty orthopedic group with in-house imaging and physical therapy

Call Center

High-volume centralized call center supporting complex scheduling workflows

Systems

Athenahealth for EHR and practice management. Keona as the primary call center workspace

The Problem

The practice had outgrown legacy systems like NextGen. Call center agents were forced to jump between tools, manually search for patient context, and duplicate work inside the EMR.

Leadership needed an EHR that exposed data cleanly and a call center platform that could move fast without breaking clinical workflows.

Why Athenahealth and Keona ?

Athenahealth offered one of the most comprehensive APIs available among EHR and PM platforms. Keona was already deeply embedded in call center operations and had proven its value during the COVID surge.

The goal was simple. Let agents live in Keona. Keep Athenahealth as the system of record. Eliminate duplicate work.

The Integration

Task Assignment Override

Keona-created patient cases route cleanly to the correct provider inside Athenahealth

Two-Screen Workflow

Agents primarily work in Keona while Athenahealth runs in parallel as the system of record

API-Driven Data Access

Balances, alert notes, visit history, and prior cases surface directly inside Keona

We did not want a system that helped us take messages but then slowed us down by forcing agents back into the EMR. Keona and Athenahealth made it possible to handle cases end to end without duplication.

Operations Leader, Orthopedic Practice

Impact on the Call Center

Faster call handling with fewer system hops

Better visibility into collections and patient context

More confident scheduling decisions

Scalable workflows during and after COVID

Why This Matters

EHR migrations are risky. Call center slowdowns are expensive. This practice proved that Athenahealth and Keona can work together without operational regression, even at scale.

Considering Athenahealth

Talk to a team that has already made this transition and kept their call center running.

Talk to Keona

Posted By

Stephen Dean

Stephen Dean

Stephen Dean is COO of Keona Health, where he’s spent 13 years building AI systems that transform patient access. Before “agentic AI” was a term, his team was deploying autonomous systems that now handle millions of patient conversations annually.