ATHENAHEALTH AND PHYSICIANS PRACTICE

Insurer rankings highlight growing patient responsibility due to consumer-directed plans

WATERTOWN, MA and BALTIMORE, MD (May 02, 2007) – athenahealth, Inc., a leading provider of web-based services, knowledge, and software for medical practices, and Physicians Practice®, America’s leading practice management journal for physicians, today released the second annual PayerViewSM Rankings. This year’s rankings have been expanded from 2006, utilizing claims performance data from more than 8,500 medical providers representing over 28 million medical charge lines for all four quarters in 2006. This data included medical services that were billed in 33 states and submitted to payers in 46 states. The PayerView data is derived from athenahealth’s web-based athenaNet® practice management system database, and ranks health insurers according to specific measures of financial, administrative performance, and medical policy complexity.

“Administrative waste associated with processing medical claims is costing Americans and businesses billions of dollars,” said Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth. “Our primary goal in creating PayerView was to bring transparency to all stake holders in healthcare and help create an industry-wide dialogue on how breakdowns in these relationships can be addressed. This year’s results indicate that some payers are making strides toward operational improvements on behalf of physicians which we believe will translate into larger cost savings to the industry at large, but there is still significant work to be done.”

“Physicians struggle daily to get paid fairly for the work they do. PayerView is one opportunity to bring that issue to the public forum as well as for physicians to make better, data-based decisions about whether to continue working with certain payers. We see PayerView as a form of empowerment for physicians as much as a wake-up call for payers,” says Pamela Moore, senior editor for Physicians Practice, the business journal that helps more than 300,000 physicians and their staff in the United States and Canada run their practices more efficiently in order to spend more time with patients.

Since its launch in June 2006, PayerView has provided an industry-unique framework to systematically address what athenahealth and Physicians Practice believe is unnecessary administrative complexity existing between payers and providers. PayerView is designed to look at payers’ performance based on a number of categories, which combine to provide an overall ranking aimed at quantifying the “ease of doing business with the payer.” All data used for the rankings come from actual claims performance data of athenahealth providers and depict athenahealth’s experience in dealing with individual payers across the nation. The rankings include national payers with at least 120,000 charge lines of data and regional payers with a minimum of 20,000 charge lines.

Source: ATHENAHEALTH