Hi, I’m Todd Park, co-founder of athenahealth.

Several years ago, my partners and I ran a birthing clinic in San Diego. And like you, we spent way too much time bogged down in paperwork, dealing with billing hassles, and chasing down payments. We were convinced there was a better way to get paid and run a practice. So we created one.

athenaCollector, our web-based physician billing and practice management solution, simplifies scheduling, gets you paid more and faster and lets you focus on patient care - while we take care of your most time-consuming tasks. It also enables a clear and real-time view of practice performance, so you can efficiently assess, plan, and grow your practice the way you want.

Here’s what athenaCollector is - and how it works:

Your day-to-day experience with athenaCollector happens through athenaNet, our industry-leading, web-based software. It’s easy to get up and running, and provides a powerful platform for managing your practice’s workflow and activity.

All you need to get started is a PC and an Internet connection. That’s it. You don’t have to buy servers, install any expensive software locally, or pay for upfront software license fees. athenaNet is hosted centrally by athenahealth, and managed by athenahealth personnel, who handle all maintenance and upgrades – at no cost to you. Through our unique pricing model, you pay only a simple monthly fee based on the individual dynamics and results of your practice.

athenaNet was designed by practice managers and billing specialists to make it as easy-to-use and as flexible as possible. It includes a complete set of award-winning patient registration, scheduling, billing, and practice management functions, and powerful tools that streamline patient processing and practice workflow.

For example, with athenahealth’s ReminderCall, you can easily automate appointment confirmations, decrease no-shows and free-up significant staff time for more important tasks. athenaCollector’s intuitive dashboard provides clear visibility into daily practice operations, including views into claim status, patient eligibility, and scheduling “to do’s” that are updated in real-time.

And athenaCollector’s reporting capabilities allow you to dive into the heart of what’s going on in your practice and gain insight into every aspect of your practice’s performance. It’s a powerful analytical tool that lets you view your accounts receivable in the aggregate, by category, and by individual claim – up close and in real-time.

You can do things like run reports to determine which payers need monitoring for what reason, or to find out which areas of your business are most successful. athenaCollector let’s you see anomalies that can be fixed, like payers who reimburse at lower than contracted rates.

As powerful as athenaNet may seem on the surface, it’s what’s behind it that really matters: an unmatched level of payer knowledge delivered through our proprietary athenahealth rules database.

Our rules database monitors your billing workflow and flags mistakes as they happen. So if an insurance ID number format is wrong or a coding rule has changed, the rules database lets you know. The mistake can be immediately corrected at a fraction of the cost of resolving it later.

The athenahealth rules database is also constantly updated by our team of experts based on the experiences of all our clients. Whenever broken or out of date payer codes are encountered and denial trends recognized, we make a fix and add it to our database as a new rule, which means your practice never confronts that problem.

Your efforts are united with thousands of other providers in a system that continually becomes more effective in billing everyone’s claims cleanly and getting accurate payment back.

Even beyond our web-based software and our rules database, there’s a dedicated back-office service team working constantly on your behalf. Every member of our team offers unparalleled dedication and support to your team.

They maintain a global dictionary of insurance package information for you. They check patient eligibility electronically on your behalf. They make sure providers are properly enrolled in payer processing systems. They submit your paper and electronic claims, and post remittance advice received from payers, including scanning in EOBs for your reference and data entering every line item of those EOBs into athenaNet. They track new government pay-for-performance opportunities to help ensure that you receive optimal incentive payments. Our specialists then follow up on denied claims and work to get them paid. And, based on all of this experience, our analysts develop new rules on an ongoing basis – rules that make your billing even cleaner and payment faster and easier.

In addition, athenahealth’s Account Management team will monitor your practice’s overall performance and offer valuable perspective and insight. In fact, we will periodically contact you to review your performance and to discuss opportunities for improvement, such as revenue optimization or cost reducing strategies.

All this energy, dedication and technology doesn’t mean a thing unless it significantly improves practice performance. And it does. athenahealth clients get paid faster, increase revenue, reduce costs and improve the level of control they have over their billing and their businesses.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about athenaCollector. The ability to get paid faster and more fully, spend less time dealing with billing hassles, increase profitability and practice medicine is just a call or click away.