The doc says "the revenue from the billing is their charges for using the clinical side." I was really wondering if this is true and if anyone uses Athena's pm side without using Athena's billing services/company?
Quote from: desheba on September 22, 2014, 01:11:56 PMThe doc says "the revenue from the billing is their charges for using the clinical side." I was really wondering if this is true and if anyone uses Athena's pm side without using Athena's billing services/company?We had a client who wanted to switch to AthenaHealth. We researched it and were told what your doctor told you. The only way you can use AthenaHealth is to let them do the billing (which is shipped overseas). Additionally, the doctor must assign his benefits to AthenaHealth. The insurance companies pay AthenaHealth, AthenaHealth takes their cut, and then sends the remainder on to the Doctor. Both of those were deal-killers for our client, but particularly the fact that the doctor loses control of HIS money - because it must be signed over to AthenaHealth.This was about three years ago, so I don't know what provisions are still in place now.
Athenahealth continually works to minimize human intervention across our service offerings. During Q3 2011, the athenaCollector team made significant headway in reducing manual work related to the denial management process. Leveraging the athenaRules engine, the team designed a sophisticated routing process to ensure that denied claims are forwarded to the appropriate specialist. This allows a significant portion of volume to be routed offshore to our business process outsourcing (BPO) partners, an important step in standardizing and ultimately automating denials work. This same routing engine will soon forward certain claims to a document creation engine. When completed, certain claim denials will result in an appeal being generated and returned to the payer with no manual intervention. We expect that the fully automated appeals process will improve average client DAR and reduce operating costs for athenahealth. Improving average client DAR remains a key point of focus for athenahealth. At 39.7 in Q3 2011, it remains higher than we’d like it to be. One of the drivers for higher average client DAR this year was actually the automated month-end close reconciliation process that we rolled out late last year. While automatically reconciling clients’ bank statements to balances posted in athenaNet eliminates work for clients and enhances the integrity of our operations, it slightly delays clients’ financial reporting and adds approximately 0.5 days to average client DAR. Furthermore, we are finding that some clients are getting behind in working items in their hold buckets, meaning that they are not addressing claim issues that we flag for them in a timely manner. Thanks to our cloud-based architecture, we are monitoring this closely and the athenaCollector team is pursuing a number of initiatives aimed at improving average client DAR. We expect that these efforts will begin to have an impact on this metric during fiscal year 2012. [End Quote]
But I think she is trying to avoid paying me and Athena for the same work. I feel bad for her because I think she is getting ripped off in so many ways!