Communication Solutions

Presbyterian Anesthesia Associates (PAA), a physician-owned anesthesiologist group with 45 board certified anesthesiologists, is now live on athenahealth's centrally-hosted, on-demand practice management and billing platform. The company has taken this step in an effort to improve operational and financial results across its care delivery organization.

 

athenahealth has built in athenaRules, a proprietary knowledge-base of payer reimbursement process rules, as part of athenahealth's software-enabled service (SeS), athenaCollector. athenaRules is designed to enforce medical provider office workflow requirements, and is continually updated with payer-specific coding and documentation information by athenahealth staff. As billing mistakes can impact operational performance and the overall patient experience, athenaRules acts as a proactive utility that guides clinic staff away from these mistakes.

 

Looking to bolster athenahealth’s services, the company has worked for over a year as this is an extremely difficult specialty to service for traditional software-only practice management vendors. The company foresees a growing market opportunity to service this specialty. Also, the company is excited to leverage its abilities, specifically around new government initiatives like the expanded 2008 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

 

“Aside from the traditional billing obstacles faced by any medical practice, our specialty faces constant regulatory change and oversight that has required us to now use a new kind of practice management service that we feel will enable us to better navigate what is an increasingly challenging reimbursement environment for anesthesiologists,” said Dr. Frank Stranick, a member of PAA's Governing Committee.

 

“We were impressed with not only athenahealth's services, but also with their people because they are a large factor in facilitating the life of each claim resulting in fewer rejections and ultimately getting us reimbursed more efficiently. By adding a fully-integrated service operation to their athenaCollector practice management offering, they have built real-time intelligence into our billing system - we just don't know of any other vendor with this capability,” added Dr. Stranick.