What’s going on in athenahealth’s Posting Department?
“This has been a big year for Posting Operations,” reports Jeremy Delinsky, Director of Payment and Clinical Document Posting Operations. Here are a few improvements we’ve made in the past few months, and a peek at what’s in store for 2008.
Increased electronic remittance advice (ERA) processing. Last year, just 28% of charge lines were posted electronically. In November, 44% of charge lines came from ERA. “This is a huge jump,” said Delinsky. “And we’re going to continue to focus on this area. We’re aiming to increase ERA postings to 50% by mid-2008 in order to speed up the entire process and minimize opportunities for errors.”
Lightening-fast posting. December 2007 was our fastest month ever. In part because of improved electronic processing, our weighted average for posting came to just 0.73 days. This performance falls well below our minimum service commitment and gives practices the rapid, accurate information needed to make timely decisions.
Record unpostable resolution. We’ve made big strides in the amount of time it takes to resolve unpostables. Now, unpostables sit just 2.5 days in queue on average before they are addressed by athenahealth staff. Again, practices get closure and don’t need to waste valuable time with long-term unpostables follow-up.
Sky-high client satisfaction. Of course, we’re thrilled to report that clients have been noticing our posting improvements. “According to our latest Client Listening Survey, satisfaction with posting is up 85% since 2006,” said Delinsky. “That’s great!”
What’s next? “In addition to continuing to increase ERA in 2008, we’re going to focus on ongoing quality improvement,” said Delinsky. “We’re designing more robust payer-specific posting rules to ensure timely, accurate posting for our clients – and we look forward to continued successes in this area.”