ATHENAHEALTH EMPOWERS PHYSICIANS TO COMPLY WITH NEW NATIONAL PROVIDER IDENTIFIER FINAL RULE
Entire national client base will be NPI-compliant with no additional cost to clients
WATERTOWN, MA (March 28, 2007) – athenahealth, Inc., the premier provider of web-based services, knowledge, and software for medical practices, today announced that its national client base of thousands of medical providers will be fully compliant with the new National Provider Identifier (NPI) Final Rule sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The new NPI rule goes into effect on May 23, 2007 and mandates that providers and payers use a designated 10-digit numeric provider identifier for all HIPAA standard administrative and financial transactions. athenahealth’s “network” approach to practice management uniquely positions the company to allow its entire client base to become NPI-compliant without the hassles of expensive upgrades or potential loss of revenue due to delays.
Many payer and provider organizations are just now undertaking massive efforts to comply with the NPI rule and may not make the deadline. CMS has reported that for provider organizations, it will take an average of 120 days to be fully compliant. Along with obtaining their unique NPI from CMS, providers then need to share them with their entire payer mix to verify that their practice management systems can accept and process the new IDs and perform online and offline testing. This tedious process can prove to be a huge challenge for medical practices and potentially put a hold on a large portion of their revenue collections.
As a provider of intuitive, on-demand practice management services, athenahealth is constantly updating its web-based athenaNet® system with the latest payer and industry requirements to maximize revenue and operational workflow for clients. Using real-time tools and a “virtual back office” service, athenahealth has worked with clients to get their NPI numbers in advance, input them into athenaNet, and proactively build connections to payers that communicate clients’ NPIs to mitigate the potential of workflow disruption. Additionally, athenahealth has obtained NPI implementation schedules from various payers, so medical practices’ legacy numbers are automatically transitioned to their new NPIs once a payer converts its system, as conversion dates will vary.
athenahealth serves as the NPI content expert for medical providers:
Informing clients of NPI deadlines and industry requirements
Verifying clients’ NPIs in athenaNet
Conducting ongoing projects to better understand various payers’ implementation strategies and timelines via our Payer Outreach Team
Disseminating clients’ NPIs to payers
Performing all payer testing, rollout, and benchmark Q/A analysis
“athenahealth currently has over 40 employees specifically dedicated to helping our clients become NPI compliant. We actually launched our NPI Project two years ago,” said Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth. “We do this because we base our revenue on a percentage of paid claims realized by our clients – a shared risk model that requires us to make sure our clients have the most up-to-date claim reimbursement requirements like the new NPI rule. Our industry-unique, payer rules engine contains over 40 million payer coding rule permutations, and is updated daily then incorporated into our clients’ workflow automatically.”
Source: ATHENAHEALTH
