athenahealth launches groundbreaking PayerView website
"Few things rankle a doctor more than an insurance company's saying it cannot find a claim for medical services. It is a problem known to many doctors as they struggle to balance the rising cost of providing patient care with what they see as a reluctance by some powerful insurers to pay promptly. Doctors in a number of states said they welcomed the athenahealth report, which also compared dozens of regional insurers around the country."
-New York Times, May 25, 2006
On May 25th, athenahealth launched the PayerView website, the first-ever review of health insurer efficiency from the vantage point of physicians. The information is also being published in the June 2006 issue of Physicians Practice magazine. PayerView ranks health insurers and provides transparency into insurers' complex payment policies with doctors. No one has ever made this kind of information public before.
The PayerView rankings analyze claim performance data from more than 7,000 providers using athenahealth's athenaNet database, and ranks national and regional health insurers according to specific measures of financial and administrative performance and medical policy complexity. The rankings look at payers' performance based on a number of categories, which combine to provide an overall "ease of doing business with" index illustrating insurers' ability to efficiently and appropriately pay claims. For example, the rankings show that Medicaid plans are typically among the worst-performing in areas such as days in accounts receivable (DAR) and first pass pay rate (FPP). There is also a great deal of variability among payers, with some regional payers ranking higher than national payers.
Physician practices, medical societies, media, and insurers are encouraged to compare the rankings and performance of specific insurers by region. (We've already heard of a Boston law firm that used the PayerView rankings to choose their insurer.) Providers are encouraged to leverage the site in order to better evaluate their payer mix. athenahealth also hopes health plans will use the site to guide quality improvement efforts.
To learn more about PayerView and to see the interactive rankings, visit www.athenapayerview.com.