Updated fee schedules can help physicians reduce denials and boost collections – here’s what you need to know

If you're feeling uneasy about your practice’s financial footing, you’re not alone—56% of physicians share that concern, according to the 2025 Physician Sentiment Survey.¹

As reimbursement becomes more complex and operational costs continue to rise, small changes in revenue cycle management (RCM) can have an outsized impact and help maintain a reliable, uninterrupted cash flow for your practice. 

One of those small changes that can make a big difference? Keeping fee schedules up to date.

Fee schedules define the dollar amount your practice charges for each CPT code. Physicians need to list all the CPT codes that they plan to bill on their fee schedule for the year, and if they’re outdated or misaligned with payer contracts, they can quietly drain revenue or cause revenue interruptions down the line for your practice.

To learn more about best practices for fee schedule updates, let’s first break down what fee schedules are and why they matter.

Why is regularly updating fee schedules an important step for physicians?

Keeping your fee schedules updated is a crucial strategy that can significantly enhance your practice's financial health and operational efficiency.

So why does keeping this updated matter?

Improved Financial Performance

Accurate, up-to-date fee schedules ensure that your billed charges reflect the rates you’ve negotiated with payers. When this is part of a consistent RCM workflow, practices can avoid costly underpayments and ensure they’re capturing the full value of their services.

More Accurate Billing

Billing errors are a leading cause of claim denials. By maintaining current fee schedules, you reduce the chance of mismatches between billed charges and contracted amounts—making your billing cleaner and more compliant from the outset.

Fewer Pre-Submission Holds

Updated fee schedules help ensure your claims meet payer expectations before they’re submitted. That means fewer last-minute holds, less time spent correcting errors, and faster reimbursements.

Opportunity for New Revenue Streams

An often-overlooked benefit of maintaining current fee schedules is that it opens the door to exploring and integrating other payment models, like value-based care. This model can help practices drive better patient outcomes, reduce costs of care, and improve care quality.

Updating fee schedules could lead to a potential 9.5% increase in collections per visit.

Financial consequences of forgetting or delaying this critical task

Because fee schedule management isn’t a daily task, it’s easy to delay or overlook—until billing problems arise, and this problem has already negatively impacted the revenue cycle.

Practices that don’t remember to regularly update their fee schedules might start to see underpayments or overpayments from payers, which could have long-term financial consequences. They could also see a drop in average Payer Yield, since practices with outdated fee schedules are likely not collecting the full amount for services to patients. Delayed updates can create a cascade of issues for practice managers and billing staff. Re-submitting claims, managing denials, and manually correcting CPT code issues is time-consuming and resource-draining.

To avoid these issues, start with one proactive habit: update your fee schedules regularly—ideally at the start of each year or whenever contract changes take place.

The benefits are real – practices see improved collections after a simple reminder

In a recent best practices campaign run by athenahealth, we reminded customers via email to update their fee schedules in athenaNet to ensure accurate billing and proper reimbursement. This reminder triggered roughly a third of our targeted customers to immediately update according to best practices.

The result? Customers that updated their fee schedules experienced almost a 10% increase in collections per visit, compared to customers that didn’t update, regardless of specialty.²

This is a tangible, data-backed outcome that reinforces how impactful this seemingly small administrative task can be. For many practices, a few hours of fee schedule maintenance at the top of the year can lead to thousands of dollars in additional collections.

5 tips for managing fee schedules as part of revenue cycle management

Making fee schedule updates as part of your broader revenue cycle management strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. For practices using athenahealth, you can find and manage your fee schedule by navigating to Billing Admin > Fee Schedule in athenaNet.

Here are five practical steps to help your practice stay on track throughout the year:

1. Update fee schedules at the top of the year - January is an ideal time to review and update your fee schedule. Contract changes often take effect then, so aligning your updates to that cycle ensures your charges reflect the most current negotiated rates.
2. Run a Payment Mismatch Report - Use the Payment Mismatch Report tool to identify discrepancies between what you charge and what you’re being paid. This report can highlight errors or outdated values that may need to be adjusted.
3. Ensure allowable schedules - Make sure your allowable schedules in athenaNet are current. This is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of mismatch reports and identifying underpayment trends.
4. Monitor critical revenue cycle metrics - Track metrics like Denial Rate, Net Collections Rate, and Payer Yield regularly. athenahealth’s Insights Dashboards let you customize and monitor these KPIs easily, so you can proactively identify when something’s off—like a drop in reimbursement or an increase in denials tied to specific codes or payers.
5. Regularly review denial reports - This can help catch any issues that may stem from outdated fee schedules. If denials for a particular CPT code spike unexpectedly, an outdated fee schedule might be the root cause.

Don’t let outdated fee schedules drain your revenue

Updated fee schedules are a crucial part of a financially viable practice, helping physicians to properly collect the right amount from payers. Practices that take the time to manage this step annually are better positioned to reduce denials, improve collections, shorten time to reimbursement, and maintain practice financial health and stability.

Our mission at athenahealth is to help set up both our customers and physicians across the country for RCM success, which is why we’ll continue to share best practices like these that can make a big difference in practice performance. Make sure you’re working with a partner who can lend the right RCM expertise for your practice to thrive.

Learn more about the athenaOne® medical billing and practice management solution.