Therapeutic Associates, Inc. of Portland, Ore. will deploy athenahealth's on-demand practice management and billing service at its outpatient facilities in the Pacific Northwest.
TAI is one of the nation's largest physical therapy and rehabilitation organizations, with more than 150 medical providers and more than 65 locations across the western United States.
"One immediate benefit gained by using a network-based system like athenahealth's is we feel it will enable our practices to focus more on care delivery and less on the business of healthcare," said Todd Gifford, Director of Information Systems for TAI. "Leveraging the national athenaNet platform will reduce demands on our staff, so resources can be focused on improving our operational efficiencies and medical billing outcomes rather than consumed on the labor-intensive and tedious processes of continually tracking changing regulations, reimbursement, quality indicators and reporting requirements."
As part of athenahealth's practice management and billing service, athenaCollector, athenahealth has built in a proprietary knowledge-base of payer reimbursement process rules, called athenaRules, which is designed to enforce physician office workflow requirements and is updated continually with payer-specific coding and documentation information.
athenaRules works with athenahealth's internet-based application and its integrated back-office service team to act as a national utility that proactively guides office staff away from making mistakes that impact the performance and profitability of their business.
"Today, athenahealth's centrally-hosted athenaNet platform has the nation's largest payer reimbursement process rules database firing in real-time across our entire national client base," said Rob Cosinuke, chief marketing officer for athenahealth. "This allows our clients to experience a network effect in which shared knowledge drives better operational and financial outcomes. Beyond delivering better financial results, we also free our clients from day-to-day hassles, so they can focus on patient care."