Waystar vs athenaCollector

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Our analysts compared Waystar vs athenaCollector based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Medical Billing Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

athenaCollector Software Tool

Product Basics

Waystar (formerly Navicure or ZirMed) is a cloud-based solution for managing a health organization’s revenue cycle. Over 25,000 hospital organizations and health clinics use this system to track patients' revenue from their first visit until their final balance has been paid.

It’s ideal for health care organizations of all sizes. It helps providers get paid faster and more accurately by automating tedious billing tasks, improving claim accuracy and offering in-depth reporting tools that uncover areas for efficiency gains.

Popular features include eligibility checks, claims submission and tracking, denial management, and analytics dashboards. 

Users praise Waystar for its user-friendly design, ability to reduce billing errors, and seamless integration with other practice management systems.

While pricing varies based on factors like practice size and specific feature sets, the vendor offers a subscription model with fees based on metrics like claim volume.

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athenaCollector, developed by athenahealth, Inc., is a comprehensive software solution designed for medical practice management. It is particularly well-suited for healthcare providers seeking to streamline their billing processes, enhance revenue cycle management, and improve overall practice efficiency. One of the key benefits of athenaCollector is its ability to reduce administrative burdens, allowing medical professionals to focus more on patient care rather than paperwork. The software is known for its robust features, including claim processing, appointment scheduling, and reporting analytics, which collectively contribute to its popularity among users. When compared to similar products in the market, athenaCollector stands out for its user-friendly interface and the high level of customer support provided by athenahealth. Pricing for athenaCollector typically varies based on the size of the practice and the specific services required, with payment options designed to accommodate different budgetary needs. This flexibility in pricing, coupled with its comprehensive suite of features, makes athenaCollector a competitive choice for medical practice management.

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Product Insights

  • Enhance Revenue Capture: Prevent lost revenue due to billing errors or missed opportunities with automated rules engines and advanced analytics. AnMed Health collected $931K in total rebilled and estimated additional revenue.
  • Boost Patients’ Financial Experiences: Use online payment portals to reduce payment friction. Renown Health reduced AR days by half while achieving a 3.8x increase in patient adoption of PatientWallet for payment management.
  • Streamline Claims Management Workflows: Achieve clean claims rate, reduce denials and automate claim submission processes with claim management capabilities. CPA Lab achieved 98% clean claim rate after using the solution.
  • Make Data-Driven Decisions: Access real-time dashboards and customize KPIs to improve financial and operational performance.
  • Optimize Revenue Cycle Management: Automate repetitive tasks like eligibility checks, claims scrubbing and payment posting to save time. Integrate with third party applications to consolidate financial data for efficient RCM processes.
  • Ensure Scalability and Adaptability: Adapt to industry changes and the growing needs of healthcare organizations.
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  • Get Paid More, Faster: AthenaCollector helps your organization get paid more quickly by scrubbing claims of any errors before submission. Denied claims can be resubmitted automatically to save time and prevent missing out on reimbursements. 
  • Improve Collections With Less Work: AthenaCollector helps to ensure the full amount of money owed is paid in a timely manner, boasting a 95% first-pass acceptance rate for insurance claims. By automating the billing and payment processes, staff members are required to do less work overall. 
  • Optimize Staff Performance: With more time available to your physicians through the automation of tasks, your healthcare professionals can get back to focusing on what’s most important — the patient. Analytics help provide insights and recognize patterns, making accurate diagnosis and treatment more likely. 
  • Compare Your Performance With Your Peers: By connecting with other AthenaHealth providers, you can compare the performance of your facility with others using the network. This can help lead to greater treatment results. Data analytics are made transparent and much easier to understand by displaying information in graphs, charts and more. 
  • Speed Up Patient Visits: Rather than having to check a patient’s insurance eligibility before each appointment, updates can be made online by the patient themselves. Additionally, a patient can walk out of the building once their appointment is finished with their payment taken out automatically. This gets rid of the time spent settling up once an appointment is finished. Athena’s advanced scheduling tool also helps to keep patient wait times down. 
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  • Financial Clearance: Verify patient insurance eligibility, secure necessary authorizations and present clear cost estimates.
    • Eligibility Verification: Instantly check patients’ insurance coverage and benefits, eliminating delays and potential errors. Automatically re-verify clients’ eligibility after data update. Apply payer-specific rules to interpret eligibility information accurately.
    • Coverage Detection: Access customizable dashboards and reports to gain visibility into potential billable coverage. Use advanced algorithms and a vast payer database to streamline coverage discovery, reducing manual effort.
    • Patient Estimation: Incorporate factors like contracted rates, insurance benefits, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums to generate reliable estimates of a patient's financial responsibility. Share clear, easy-to-understand estimates with patients, building trust and minimizing billing surprises.
    • Authorizations: Secure necessary approvals from insurance payers before rendering specific services, treatments or medications. Monitor authorization requests statuses (pending, approved or denied) in real time. Generate and track referrals to specialists or other facilities, ensuring compliance with payer requirements.
    • Charity Screening: Analyze patient financial data (income, assets, etc.) against established charity care policies to quickly determine potential qualifications. Pull relevant financial information from multiple sources (credit reports, public records or patient self-attestation) for a comprehensive assessment.
  • Revenue Capture: Prevent billing errors, uncover missed charges, and eliminate undercoding and upcoding.
    • Charge Integrity: Use complex algorithms and rules engines to scan billing codes (CPT, HCPCS, etc.) against documentation to identify missing or potentially inaccurate charges. Identify instances where codes may not fully align with services rendered, minimizing compliance risks and potential audits.
    • DRG Anomaly Detection: Analyze patient data to compare the assigned DRG against what the documentation supports. Identify mismatches that could result in underpayment or overpayment. Flag DRG anomalies for review and correction before claims submissions.
    • DRG Transfer: Analyze historical claims data to uncover potentially under-coded or missed TDRGs. Automate claims recalculating processes and refile them with the correct TDRG code, recovering what was rightfully owed.
  • Claim Management: Streamline claim submission and tracking processes.
    • Claim Manager: Automatically scrub claims for errors, omissions and inconsistencies (missing modifiers or invalid codes) before submission. Help staff efficiently prioritize claims needing review or action (pre-edits, denials, etc.).
    • Monitoring: Pull and update claim status details directly from payer portals. Access dashboards to gain an up-to-the-minute view of where claims stand in the process (submitted, in progress, paid or denied) for individual claims or across the whole A/R.
    • Attachments: Securely transfer medical records, prior authorizations, EOBs, and other supporting files directly into the system. Process multiple attachments simultaneously, especially for high-volume situations.
  • Payment Management: Simplify patient and payer interactions with convenient digital payment options, clear estimates and automated payment posting tools.
    • Payer Reimbursement: Use intelligent algorithms to match payments from payers to the specific claims they were intended for, even with partial payments or complex scenarios. Quickly locate and download ERAs for review or reconciliation.
    • Patient Payments: Send digital bills and automated reminders, encouraging on-time payments. Enable patients to view balances and make payments using credit cards, debit cards or bank transfers.
    • Agency Manager: Access vendor scorecards for analyzing agency activity and results. Employ reconciliation tools to assign each overdue account to the appropriate collection agency.
  • Denial Resolution: Mandate pre-submission validation on all claims to reduce the volume of preventable rejections and denials. Identify trends and patterns of denied claims to make strategic changes to processes, documentation or workflows.
  • Analytics and Reporting: Focus on critical indicators like denial rates, A/R days and clean claim rates.
    • Medicare Analytics: Bypass manual processes and access Medicare's FISS system directly within the platform. Get clear claim status with easy-to-understand reason codes. Use worklists to prioritize denied, rejected, or RTP claims for rapid follow-up.
    • Compliance Reporting: Monitor and report on key quality measures like MIPS and HEDIS mandated by CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and other payers. Automatically retrieve the latest CASPER reports directly from CMS.
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  • Performance Reporting: AthenaCollector allows your health professionals to view detailed, real-time reports with the click of a button. Benchmarks are established based on comparisons with other AthenaHealth customers to help drive better results. 
  • Revenue Cycle Dashboard: Physicians can easily access revenue cycle tasks as well as patient information from a singular, centralized dashboard. The intuitive dashboard lets users quickly bounce around from one task to another without getting lost. 
  • Appointment Scheduling: This allows your organization to optimize the number of appointments, increasing daily traffic. The online scheduling tool helps to eliminate double-scheduling or scheduling conflicts while connecting your physicians with patients. Automatic reminders are also sent out to help prevent no-shows. 
  • Claims Management: AthenaCollector is able to automatically verify a patient’s insurance eligibility prior to their appointment. Its automatically updated rules engine helps catch errors within claims before submitting them, leading to fewer denials and higher first-time acceptance rates. 
  • Patient Check-In: Patients are able to check themselves in online before showing up for their appointments. Any necessary information can be updated prior to the time of an appointment, saving themselves the time spent filling out charts, providing insurance and more. 
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Product Ranking

#43

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Medical Billing Software

#18

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Medical Billing Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 315 reviews
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91%
of users recommend this product

Waystar has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 315 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

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4.6 (116)
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4.5 (199)
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Awards

Waystar stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Robust Integration Capabilities: Integrate with EHRs, medical billing solutions and practice management systems to eliminate duplicate data entry.
Easy-to-Use Dashboard: Gain a centralized view of key metrics for quick insights on claim statuses, denial rates and reasons, and A/R aging.
Comprehensive Revenue Cycle Management Suite: Eligibility verification, coding, payment posting, and analytics and reporting tools help practices streamline revenue management processes.
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Streamlined Claim Scrubbing: Users appreciate the ability to submit cleaner claims, reducing denials and rework, which in turn improves revenue cycle efficiency.
Integrated Patient Engagement Tools: Features like appointment reminders and patient portals enhance patient communication and satisfaction, leading to better patient retention and loyalty.
Comprehensive Reporting: Robust reporting capabilities provide insights into practice performance, allowing for data-driven decision-making and practice optimization.
Cloud-Based Accessibility: The cloud-based nature of athenaCollector enables access from anywhere with an internet connection, offering flexibility and convenience for healthcare providers.
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Steep Learning Curve: Training can be time-consuming and disruptive to practice’s workflow initially.
High Cost: Initial expenses (setup and software licenses) can be significant.
Complex Secondary Claims Submission: May require manual workarounds, resulting in reimbursement delays.
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Customer Support: Users have reported challenges in reaching customer support promptly and receiving timely resolutions to their inquiries.
Software Issues: Some users have encountered technical problems and glitches within the software, leading to disruptions in workflow and potential data inaccuracies.
System Updates: The frequency of system updates has been a concern for some users, as they can sometimes lead to temporary disruptions or require additional training to adapt to new features or changes in functionality.
Cost: The pricing structure and associated costs of athenaCollector have been mentioned as a drawback by some users, particularly for smaller practices or those with budget constraints.
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Waystar's core strength lies in its ability to automate repetitive, error-prone tasks within RCM. This can free up significant staff time for higher-value work, and reduce costly mistakes that lead to denials or missed revenue. Additionally, analytics tools appear robust, providing insights that can drive better decision-making around process improvement and resource allocation.However, smaller practices may find the cost and complexity prohibitive. Additionally, like any cloud-based system, maximizing Waystar's value will require ongoing training and attention to updates.

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Stepping into the bustling world of medical practice management software, athenaCollector emerges as a prominent contender, but how does it truly fare in the eyes of its users? Let's delve into the experiences shared by those who have navigated the intricacies of this platform. athenaCollector garners praise for its comprehensive suite of features, encompassing electronic health records (EHRs), patient scheduling, billing, and insurance claims processing. Users appreciate the platform's ability to streamline administrative tasks, allowing healthcare providers to dedicate more time to patient care. The user-friendly interface and customization options further contribute to its appeal. However, a recurring concern among users is the cost associated with athenaCollector. Some find the pricing structure to be relatively high compared to alternative solutions. Additionally, while the platform offers customer support, there have been instances where users have expressed dissatisfaction with the responsiveness or effectiveness of the assistance provided. When compared to competitors like SimplePractice, Waystar, and Kareo, athenaCollector distinguishes itself through its robust feature set and integration capabilities. Its ability to handle complex billing processes and manage large volumes of patient data makes it particularly well-suited for larger medical practices or those with specialized needs. Smaller practices or solo practitioners may find more cost-effective options with comparable features among the alternatives available. Ultimately, the suitability of athenaCollector hinges on the specific requirements and priorities of each medical practice. For those seeking a comprehensive and integrated solution with a wide range of features, athenaCollector proves to be a valuable asset, despite its higher price point. However, smaller practices or those with budget constraints may find better value in alternative platforms that offer a more streamlined and affordable approach.

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