Before I chose athena I was doing billing, I was outsourcing billing to an outside biller and each month at the end of the month he would come over and tell me what I’ve made and show me some reports. And I basically had to trust everything he was telling me, I had no idea how I was doing during the month. From day to day I was waiting until the end of the month to see if we had a good month or not.

When you don’t know what your future revenue stream is going to be, it’s very difficult to make decisions about staffing or purchasing equipment or expansion of the practice because it’s all very risky.

I then learned about athena from a friend who was using it and I thought wow I can actually see each day, what was billed, what was collected. It was a total life changer, it was an epiphany moment for me, I thought this is the greatest product I’ve seen so far.

I went to athena to actually see physically the building and to see that it existed. It was filled with enormous amounts of energy and talent. I mean they were getting people right out of MIT to create the rules engines so you don’t get that with a product off the shelf. So that was extremely attractive so I signed up with athena. Our revenue stream dramatically improved as soon as we went on with athenaCollector. We were actually collecting 99% of what we would do. We were now aware of what we weren’t getting.

It allows us to run reports to see what the differences between what our negotiated reimbursement is for a certain code versus what we actually were reimbursed. And that’s very powerful when you approach the insurance company or your payers and you now have data, they’re not used to this.

They have no good comeback when we show them what they’ve done so we get all of our bills paid. So our income went up 10% just in that first year just by choosing athenaCollector.

We used to have claims that would be 60, 90 days and that was very common for us. But now that they know we’re watching because we’re calling them out on it. We’re saying, our payers are 12, 14 days, you’re 40 what’s the problem, why is this taking so long because it’s in our system and it’s telling us. And they’re responding and our average days in review are between 20 and 24, which is a huge difference.

You can see every day what is going on in your practice, minute to minute if you so choose. I feel that they are actually a part of my practice; it’s not just this company I send stuff to. They are intimately integrated into my daily operations.

It’s amazing to me that medicine never had that before and we have it now so it’s made an enormous difference in the way we make decisions and the way our practice has been running for the last four years.

Staying with them my office is going to get better and better and better.