Inside athenaCollectorSM: Which Improvements Were Most Valuable to You?
2007 was a great year for athenaCollector. Here are some of the highlights of our continuously enhanced physician billing and practice management services offering – which did your practice enjoy most?
The National Provider Identifier (NPI) implementation has gone smoothly, thanks to dozens of athenistas staying on top of the (often daily) updates from CMS and the hundreds of payers to which we submit claims on clients’ behalf. We have been researching, planning, and testing for over a year now – and it shows! Our clients have not had to read any payer manuals, websites, install any software upgrades, or experience the cash flow interruptions that have affected others.
A year ago, posting was a source of dissatisfaction to our clients. A massive Medicare readjudication in mid-2006 and the resulting spike in posting volume temporarily destabilized the operation. We are thrilled to report that backlogs have been eliminated, average turnaround time is under one day, and client satisfaction is at record highs! While all this was going on, we raised our ERA rate from 25% to 45%, raised the quality performance, and streamlined our handling of unpostables. The team has worked incredibly hard over the past year to turn posting around, and have done an excellent job. We have big plans for making posting even better in 2008.
We developed and launched the first fully-integrated all-payer platform that enables our entire client base to perform real-time adjudication (RTA) of medical claims at the point-of-service for participating payers. Working with Humana Inc., athenahealth's RTA functionality enables clients to submit a claim at the time of service, receive a fully adjudicated claim response from the payer within seconds and collect the appropriate payment for services that qualify for real-time claim adjudication before the patient leaves the office.
We’ve overhauled the cash collection process to give you better control over your money and a stronger foundation for bank statement reconciliation. To do this, we created better tools for bank statement reconciliation, introduced a new workflow to facilitate closer monitoring of deposits in athenaNet, and created several new reports to aid both cash-basis and accrual clients in closing their accounting month.
We made reporting more flexible and accessible with Report Builder. We built a suite of standard reports, introduced a better way for you to organize your reports, and provided a better mechanism for sharing and permissioning access to reports.
The Payment Mismatch Tracking Wizard is faster than ever, and now includes all services so you can see exactly what you need to load into an Allowable Schedule. We’ve also added Local Allowable Categories to make modeling your contracts easier.
We’ve made improvements to our anesthesia offering, enabling users to create an entire batch of claims with just a click of a button, already formatted according to the payer’s requirements! Workflow improvements allow users to register patients within the time sheet, easily change payers and reformat claims, and accurately capture add-on C-sections that span midnight. We introduced local code sets for reporting, such as operating room or post-operative complications, enhanced the existing data available through Code Correct, and provided more opportunities to customize charge calculation with Local Base Unit values.
Finally, our team has been working hard to make sure it’s as easy – again – to participate in the 2008 PQRI (Physician Quality Reporting Initiative) program [see the story in this issue].
What will 2008 bring? Stay tuned!