Athena can push a claim cleanly through billing and still leave the patient balance sitting untouched 90 days later — good software was never built to make a phone call or negotiate a payment plan.
Nexa’s integration with AthenaNet transfers past-due patient accounts directly into Kinum for automated recovery, whether an account is fresh enough for a flat $9.75 letter sequence or old enough to need 40% contingency work. Switching from another agency’s AthenaNet setup is genuinely simple, and the result is typically a lower rate, stronger recovery, and HIPAA-aligned, 50-state-licensed handling backed by responsive support.
Athena Is Strong Software — It Just Doesn’t Collect
Athenahealth supports thousands of medical and dental providers and pushes hundreds of millions of claims a year. Yet many practices on Athena still watch A/R days drift into the 45–60+ range, patient balances pile up in 90+ day aging, and denials outpace what staff can chase down. The software is modern. The money is still stuck.
What Athena Does Well
Capturing charges and sending cleaner claims, checking eligibility and surfacing coverage data, automating portions of prior auth and denial prevention, and giving practices real dashboards for A/R, denials, and collections — Athena earns its reputation here.
What It Was Never Built to Do
Athena isn’t a contingency collection agency. It doesn’t call seriously overdue patients for weeks or months, negotiate payment plans with people juggling multiple debts, skip-trace bad addresses and disconnected phone numbers, or handle legal escalation. Once a balance clears 90–120 days with no response, it’s outside the normal Athenaworkflow and into third-party collections territory.
Medical and Dental A/R on the Same Platform
One strength of athenahealth is running both sides of a practice in one system. Multi-specialty groups, CHCs, and FQHCs can manage medical and dental A/R together, viewing it by provider, service line, location, and payer — with dental modules supporting treatment plans, estimates, and aging similar to the medical side. That means an Athena report can already show which medical services generate the most unpaid balances and which dental procedures or plans tend to age into 90+ days. The missing piece has always been deciding what happens next with those balances — which is exactly what the integration below is built to close.
The Direct AthenaNet-to-Kinum Integration
How the Transfer Actually Works
Nexa, together with its integration vendors, connects directly to AthenaNet so that past-due patient accounts move from your practice’s own interface into Kinum for automated recovery — without a manual export, a spreadsheet, or a separate upload process. Accounts that match your placement rules move on a set cadence rather than waiting for someone on staff to remember to pull a report.
Illustrative Example: The Report Nobody Had Time to Run
Consider a composite scenario: a multi-location dental group’s office manager knows which accounts should go to collections every month, based on the practice’s own 90-day rule — but pulling that report, formatting it, and emailing it to a vendor consistently slips to the bottom of a busy week. With the balances flowing automatically from AthenaNet once they match the agreed criteria, that task disappears rather than just getting done a little late.
Turning athenaOne Metrics Into Placement Rules
Athena gives you the data. The rules for what to do with it are still yours to set.
Days in A/R
Many groups aim for 30–45 days. Consistently running over 45–50 days is a sign of carrying more risk than the numbers might suggest at a glance.
A/R Aging Buckets
The 0–30 and 31–60 day buckets should hold most of a healthy practice’s balances. When a large share sits in 90+ days, those accounts are unlikely to self-cure without outside follow-up.
Net Collection Rate
The goal is staying close to 100% of net collectible revenue over time. A falling collection rate alongside stable patient volume is a quiet signal that more money is turning into bad debt than the top-line numbers reveal.
Turning those metrics into simple placement rules — any balance 90+ days old with no payment or arrangement, larger balances escalating faster than small ones, elective or high-dollar visit types getting closer follow-up earlier — is what actually moves accounts out of aging and into recovery instead of letting them sit.
Already Using AthenaNet’s Integration With Another Agency?
What Changes When You Switch
If a practice is already running patient accounts through AthenaNet into a different collection agency, moving to Nexa’s integration is meant to be a straightforward swap, not a rebuild. The typical result: a lower per-account rate than many competing integrations, recovery performance that’s tracked and reported rather than taken on faith, HIPAA-aligned and secure handling of the same patient data, more responsive support when a question comes up, and licensing across all 50 states rather than a patchwork of regional coverage.
Illustrative Example: The Switch That Took a Phone Call, Not a Project
Picture a composite scenario: a multi-provider practice has been sending accounts through AthenaNet into a national collection vendor for two years, with a support experience that’s slowed noticeably as the vendor scaled. Moving the integration to route into Kinum instead doesn’t require rebuilding the practice’s placement rules or re-training staff — the AthenaNet side of the workflow looks the same; only what happens after the account leaves the practice changes.
AI + Humans: Where Athena Ends and Collections Begins
athenahealth has invested heavily in AI-native RCM to clean claims before submission, speed up prior auths, and reduce preventable denials — the front end of the revenue cycle. The back end still needs people: talking to patients who are confused or worried about a bill, setting up payment plans that actually reflect what someone juggling multiple debts can pay, tracking down a debtor who’s moved, and escalating a small subset of accounts through legal channels when it’s actually warranted. A collection partner built for this space understands HIPAA, FDCPA, state-specific rules, and the realities of high-deductible plans — and works from your Athena exports rather than asking you to reformat everything first.
Success Stories
The scenarios below are illustrative composites drawn from the kinds of situations that come up repeatedly across athenahealth practices, not verified individual case results, but they reflect the actual mechanics of how each type of recovery tends to get resolved.
The Multi-Specialty Group Cutting Its A/R Days
Problem: A multi-specialty group running both medical and dental on Athena had A/R days drifting past 55, with 90+ day balances accumulating faster than staff could review them.
Approach: Placement rules were set directly against the group’s own aging buckets, with the AthenaNet integration moving qualifying accounts automatically rather than waiting on a monthly manual pull.
Outcome: A/R days trended back toward the practice’s 30-45 day target within a couple of quarters, with far less staff time spent chasing the process itself.
The FQHC Switching From a Slower Integration
Problem: A federally qualified health center had been using a different agency’s AthenaNet integration for years, but response times on account questions had stretched to days rather than hours.
Approach: The integration was rerouted to Kinum with the center’s existing placement rules carried over unchanged.
Outcome: The center kept the same workflow it was used to, with faster support and a lower per-account rate on its fixed-fee letter volume.
The Dental Group’s High-Deductible Backlog
Problem: A dental practice group was seeing a growing share of treatment-plan balances age into 90+ days as more patients carried high-deductible plans and set balances aside rather than refusing them outright.
Approach: A $9.75 fixed-fee letter sequence ran on the freshest of these accounts before any moved to contingency.
Outcome: A meaningful share of the backlog resolved directly, with patients paying the full balance and no commission owed on those accounts.
Trust, Security & Compliance
HIPAA & BAA Coverage
Patient billing records carry protected health information regardless of practice size. Nexa maintains HIPAA-aligned handling procedures for all AthenaNet-sourced accounts and executes a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with practices that require one.
FDCPA Alignment
Every account is worked in alignment with the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, with a litigious-patient scrub run before outreach begins to reduce the chance of a lawsuit arising from the collection process itself.
SOC 2 Type II & PCI-DSS Data Security
Data handling is SOC 2 Type II certified — meaning security and privacy controls have been independently audited, not self-reported — and payment processing runs at PCI-DSS Level 1, a high tier of card data encryption.
Secure Client Portal for Documentation & Account Tracking
A 24/7 client portal built to PCI/SOC cybersecurity standards lets a practice track account status and recovery progress without needing to call or email for an update, on top of whatever visibility the AthenaNet integration itself provides.
Transparent Pricing for AthenaHealth Practices
Fixed-Fee Collection Demands ($9.75/account)
Five collection letters sent every few days in colored print, including a “thank you” letter once a patient pays in full. Change-of-address, bankruptcy, and litigious-patient checks run on every account. Debtors pay 100% directly to you; no commissions on this tier.
Contingency Service (40%)
Performance-based recovery for accounts that need calls and negotiation, not just letters. No Recovery, No Fee.
No setup fee, minimum volume, hidden cost, or contract length — most practices run on a pay-as-used basis. Collection activity is available in both English and Spanish.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the AthenaNet integration require our IT team to build anything custom?
No. The integration is designed to connect on the vendor side, so a practice’s own AthenaNet workflow doesn’t need custom development to start routing qualifying accounts.
What happens to an account’s status in athenaOne once it’s transferred to collections?
That depends on your practice’s own reporting setup, but the goal of the integration is to keep the transfer visible in your existing workflow rather than making an account disappear into a separate system with no trace.
If we switch from another agency’s AthenaNet integration, do we lose our account history?
No. Switching the integration changes where an account routes to after it leaves your practice’s system — it doesn’t require rebuilding your placement rules or losing the history already in AthenaNet.
Can dental treatment-plan balances flow through the same integration as medical accounts?
Yes. Since Athena already tracks medical and dental A/R together for multi-specialty groups, both account types can move through the same AthenaNet connection.
Does the $9.75 rate change for a multi-specialty group running both medical and dental?
The fixed-fee rate applies per account regardless of specialty, and higher overall volume can lower it further — worth discussing directly if a group is running a large combined portfolio.
What happens to accounts already mid-cycle with our current agency if we switch integrations?
Accounts already in an active letter or call sequence with a prior agency typically finish out under that agency’s process, while new qualifying accounts route through the new integration going forward — avoiding duplicate contact on the same balance.
Combine What Athena Does Best With a Stronger Collections Layer
If your Athena dashboards look sophisticated but your A/R days and 90+ balances keep climbing, the software isn’t the problem — the missing piece is what happens after an account ages out of the normal workflow. Please mention in your inquiry that you use AthenaHealth to confirm the $9.75 practice rate.