We are excited to officially launch athena's Live Benchmarking Program. If you've been live on athenaNet for over 90 days, you have seen this in action - and many of you live by this daily.

Here is how Live Benchmarking works: Live Benchmarks provide a quick pulse check of your practice's performance across four "best practice" metrics, and then compares your practice with other athena practices in your state, region, specialty, and group size (provided there are at least 5 practices to be compared). You can see your overall rank in each category over a 7-day average for a real-time view, and a 91-day average for a quarterly view.

And here's the fun part…You're not the only one looking at these reports! At the end of each month, athena will review the rankings. Clients will receive points for each first, second and third place finish in any category. We will award 100 points for gold, 50 points for silver and 25 points for bronze.

Every quarter, we'll award prizes to the gold, silver and bronze winners in each region. Regional silver and bronze winners will receive lunch for the office. Regional gold winners will receive a catered lunch for the office and a special visit from athena personnel.

Every year, we'll award one raffle ticket to each regional bronze winner, two raffle tickets to each silver winner and three raffles tickets to each gold winner for a drawing at the User's Conference for an annual grand prize (details to be announced).

Here are the specifics…

Each report (7-day average and 91-day average) contains 5 columns:
Count – number of practices in that row
Charge entry lag – average length of time (in days) between the date of service and the date the charge is entered
HOLD lag – average number of days claims sit in the hold bucket before being worked
MGRHOLD lag – average number of days claims sit in the manager hold bucket before being worked
% of Self Pay > 90 days – percentage of open self pay balances that are older than 90 days

Within each column, there are 2 sub-columns:
Median – median figure of that column, or what the average practice has for that category
Your rank – where you rank in that category in comparison to other practices (this will make more sense in a moment). First, second and third rankings are denoted by gold, sliver and bronze highlighting

Data is further reported in 8 rows:
Your practice – figures for your practice for each of the category columns (the count would be 1 because it is only for your practice)
Specialty Care Practices in your State – number of specialty care practices in your state and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
Specialty Care Practices in your Region – number of specialty care practices in your region and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
All Specialty Care Practices - number of specialty care practices across all of athenaNet and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
All State-Wide Practices - number of practices in your state and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
All Regional Practices - number of practices in your region and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
Practices by Size - number of practices of the same or similar size across athenaNet (by total number of billable providers) and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them
National - number of practices across all of athenaNet and their median for each category, and where your practice ranks against them

Will you be a prize-winner next quarter? Stay tuned...