AthenaHealth Patient Portal: Medical Collection Agency

athenaOne is strong software – but it doesn’t collect your old balances

athenahealth supports thousands of medical and dental providers and pushes hundreds of millions of claims a year. athenaOne gives you:

EHR and practice management
Built-in billing and RCM tools
AI features to clean up claims and reduce manual work

Yet many practices on athenahealth still face:

A/R days drifting into the 45–60+ range
Patient balances that sit in 90+ day aging
Rising denials that staff can’t keep up with

In other words, your software is modern, but your money is still stuck.

What athenaOne does well for revenue – and what it doesn’t

athenaOne is excellent at:

Capturing charges and sending cleaner claims
Checking eligibility and surfacing coverage data
Automating portions of prior auth and denial prevention
Giving you dashboards for A/R, denials, and collections

But athenaOne is not a contingency collection agency. It does not:

Call seriously overdue patients for weeks or months
Negotiate payment plans with people juggling multiple debts
Skip-trace bad addresses and lost phone numbers
File lawsuits or handle legal escalation

Once balances hit 90–120+ days with no response, you’re outside the normal athena workflow and into third-party collections territory.

Serving AthenaHealth Practices Nationwide

Recover unpaid medical bills: Contact Us

$9.75 for five Collection Demands. Contingency fees flat 40%

Medical and dental A/R on the same athenahealth platform

One strength of athenahealth is how it serves both medical and dental:

Multi-specialty groups, CHCs and FQHCs can run medical and dental in one system.
You can see A/R by provider, service line, location, and payer.
Dental modules support treatment plans, estimates, and A/R aging similar to your medical side.

That means your athenaOne reports can show:

Which medical services generate the most unpaid balances
Which dental procedures or plans tend to age into 90+ days
Where patient-pay exposure is highest across both sides of the practice

The missing piece is deciding what happens next with those aging balances.

Using athenaOne metrics to decide what goes to collections

athenaOne gives you the data. You need the rules.

From your athena dashboards and A/R reports, track:

Days in A/R
- Many groups aim for 30–45 days.
- Consistently over 45–50 days is a sign you’re carrying too much risk.
A/R aging buckets
- 0–30 and 31–60 days should hold most of your balances.
- When a big chunk of A/R is sitting in 90+ days, those accounts are unlikely to self-cure.
Net collection rate
- Over time, you want to be as close to 100% of net collectible as possible.
- A falling collection rate with stable volume means more money is quietly turning into bad debt.

Turn those numbers into simple placement rules, for example:

Any patient balance 90+ days old, with no payment or arrangement → eligible for third-party collections
Larger balances (e.g., $500+ or $1,000+) escalate faster than tiny ones
Certain visit types (elective, high-dollar, dental treatment plans) get closer follow-up at 30–60 days

Once the rules are written, you use athenaOne reports each month to pull accounts that match and move them to collections instead of letting them sit.

AI + humans: athenaOne plus a collection agency

athenahealth has invested heavily in AI-native RCM to:

Clean claims before submission
Speed up prior auths
Reduce preventable denials

That’s the front end of your revenue cycle. The back end still needs people:

Talking to patients who are confused or scared about their bills
Setting up realistic payment plans
Tracking down moved or unresponsive debtors
Escalating a small subset of accounts through legal channels when needed

A good medical/dental collection agency understands HIPAA, FDCPA, state rules, and the realities of high-deductible plans. They work from your athena exports, treat patients respectfully, and focus on recovering balances that your internal team can’t reach.

How Nexa fits into your athenahealth collections strategy

If your athenaOne dashboards look sophisticated but your A/R days and 90+ balances keep rising, you don’t need more screens — you need a stronger collections layer.

Nexa is an information portal that helps medical, dental, and integrated practices find suitable collection agencies.

We are not a collection agency and we do not perform credit reporting.
You share your collection requirements with us: specialty mix, patient profile, A/R issues.
We then share those requirements with carefully shortlisted, healthcare-focused agencies we believe can handle your type of A/R.
It is entirely your decision whether or not to work with them.

If your athenahealth system is doing its job but your cash flow still isn’t, combine what athenaOne does best with a well-chosen collection partner. Together, they help you turn more of your billed charges into actual, collected cash — on both the medical and dental side.

Contact us today if you want a lower-cost collection agency providing superior recovery rates for AthenaHealth practices.

Please mention in the “notes” section that you use AthenaHealth to qualify for a special rate of $9.75 per account.

Features and Cost

– A special price for AthenaHealth practices is only $9.75 per account for the Collection Letters service. Already serving more than 100 AthenaHealth medical practices. Higher volume lowers this price even further.

– Five collection letters are sent every few days in colored print, including a provision to send a “Thank you” letter after the patient pays in full.

– Change of Address, Bankruptcy check and Litigious patient check are performed on all accounts. “Litigious patient scrub” minimizes the chances of lawsuits that a patient can file on medical practices.

– FDCPA, TCPA, GLBA and HIPAA Complaint

– A 24×7 client portal with PCI/SOC cybersecurity standards is additionally available.

– A low contingency cost of no more than 40% is charged for the Collection Calls service.

– Collection activity can be performed in both English and Spanish.

– No setup fee, minimum volume, hidden cost, or contract length.

– Most practices are set up under the Pay-as-used billing scheme.

– Friendly collection practices, state-of-the-art technology and vast healthcare collections experience.

– Licensed, bonded and insured. Collecting money across all 50 states.

Use our “Contact Us“ form and we will have a well-trained professional with several years of experience in setting up AthenaHealth accounts for the Collection Letters and/or Collection Calls service.