athenahealth Response: Yes

Benefit to You: Through the news and messages screens, practices have the ability to send and receive messages internally within the athenahealth system.

athenahealth Response: They can be customized as needed

Benefit to You: This provides great flexibility at the practice to customize billing slips by clinician or location. Updates are quick and easy.

athenahealth Response: Your medical group.

Benefit to You: Through the extensive reporting functions, practices have the information which is invaluable when negotiating managed care contracts.

athenahealth Response: If you generate a claim with a date of service which is after the expiration date, the claim will go into HOLD. The user will get a message indicating that the patients insurance has expired.

Benefit to You: This feature provides the security needed to prevent users from submitting claims when the patient's insurance has expired.

athenahealth Response: Yes, there is a process in place that lets clients prevent duplicate schedules from being created.

Benefit to You: Flexibility – clients can merge templates prior to applying them system wide.

athenahealth Response: The primary department is typically where the medical record would be stored.

Benefit to You: It is also useful if you are trying to track patient transfers between offices; i.e., how many patients start out in one clinic and end up moving to another; athenaNet lets you know where the patient originated in the system.

athenahealth Response: You may create a provider named x-ray or ultrasound and then build out schedule templates for these purposes.

Benefit to You: This feature allows the practice to schedule procedures when the rendering provider is not known at the time the appointment is made.

athenahealth Response: The CBO at athenahealth maintains the master file for insurance companies.

Benefit to You: The turnaround time for insurances to be added to the system is typically 48 hours. Claims are automatically placed on hold until the package has been added and the account also displays a warning on the patient quick view screen that indicates the insurance is still pending. The system will not allow the claim to be billed out unless the insurance package is valid and confirmed by athenahealth's experts. This guarantees that insurance packages that are used by your staff are accurate.

athenahealth Response: athenahealth uses the most recent zip code list. This list is updated periodically.

Benefit to You: The benefit of this feature is that is reduces the amount of data entry your staff must do to register a patient, therefore speeding up the registration process.

athenahealth Response: If a master file is built into one practice, athenahealth can duplicate that master file across other practices.

Benefit to You: The benefit is reduced set-up time.