athenahealth Offering Disaster-Proof Revenue Cycle Management Services for Hurricane Victims

athenahealth, a provider of online revenue cycle management services for medical practices, is offering its services at no upfront cost to all practices affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in an effort to help rebuild the region’s healthcare infrastructure and better prepare practices to face future challenges.

athenahealth CEO, Jonathan Bush, extended athenahealth’s offer at the Healthcare Recovery in the Aftermath workshop for hurricane displaced and recovering medical practices held at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel on Nov. 4.

Practices are already working with athenahealth to take advantage of the offer. Interested practices should contact athenahealth at 888-652-8200 or visit their Web site: www.athenahealth.com. The offer is available until March 31, 2006.

athenahealth combines a web-based practice management system, a proprietary database of insurance company rules, and outsourced billing and collections specialists into a single service.

Because this service is delivered over the Internet, and all of the claims submissions, appeals and collections are handled remotely by athenahealth staff, athenahealth clients in hurricane-affected areas were reportedly able to keep running despite sustaining significant damage. For practices that have been closed, athenahealth has allowed them to continue to submit claims, appeal denials, and make deposits into bank accounts, so that doctors could continue to make payroll.

athenahealth charges no upfront license fee for its software. Instead, it charges a small percentage of each claim collected, and a one time start-up fee to cover data transfer, training, and set-up with the practice’s payors. athenahealth is offering to start-up hurricane-affected physician practices for no upfront cost. athenahealth will waive half of the start-up fee and roll the balance into the first year’s subscription fees.