Client Success Story: DAR Drops, Revenue Grows at Large Medical Center
Within moments of meeting athenahealth’s co-founder Todd Park, Tammy Shepherd, the chief financial officer for Medical Administrative Services at The University of Kansas Medical Center, felt athenahealth’s unique web based services might be a good fit.
Less than a year later, the physician practices owned by the University of Kansas Hospital went live with athenahealth’s physician billing and practice management services.
Currently, over 70 KU Medical doctors and providers are billing on the system, which is helping to enforce best practices and provide accountability across the practice.
“athenahealth is built the way you want it to be,” Shepherd said. “Other systems are old and outdated. We add new features from other vendors every so often but the other systems really pale in comparison to athenahealth which is updating its rules and features all the time.”
athenahealth provides customers with an instant system upgrade about every six weeks and the staff is continually updating the rules engine as payer requirements change. Updates appear instantly in the KU Medical work screen. There’s no installation, no new software. The staff sees the changes instantly, without jumping through any upgrade or implementation hoops.
“Before athenahealth, our claims would drop and we wouldn’t know why,” Shepherd said. “We would find out 60 days into the process and then have to start over.”
With athenahealth, it’s easier to see when the mistakes are made. Administrators are more accountable for their claims because the system can pinpoint missing slips and incorrect information in a claim. If an insurance number or billing code is entered incorrectly, athenahealth flags the error and immediately identifies why the claim will not drop clean.
The system has also considerably reduced the average claim’s days in accounts receivable. Before athenahealth, a cardiology claim would usually spend roughly 65 days in accounts receivable. But now, thanks to the athenahealth staff’s monitoring of every claim’s progress, that number has dropped to roughly 35 days in accounts receivable.
“We have eight specialties billing with athenahealth,” Shepherd said. “Every single entity has seen a significant drop in days in accounts receivable.”
Two KU Medical staff members interface directly with athenahealth, providing the company with feedback and suggestions on how the system can be improved.
“Almost all of the enhancements that we’ve asked for have made been done,” Shepherd said. “They really listen to their customers and appreciate the feedback.”