A new health plan data exchange service from athenahealth offers support its providers who exchange clinical data with payers for quality management, risk adjustment and performance management programs, the company announced Wednesday.
The new service creates a direct connection between participating health plans and technology partners, officials said. It connects to athenahealth's EHR, athenaClinicals, digitizing what was traditionally a manual process.
The goal is to reduce disruption to provider requests, manual chart audits by health plans and deliver clinical data to health plans in a standard format, officials said.
Jonathan Bush, athenahealth's CEO, said electronic data exchange for health plans will reduce "friction between health plans and providers in clinical data and quality reporting."
"After hearing from our providers how disruptive manual chart audits are to their practices, and how incomplete the data conveyed through this process could be, athenahealth was inspired to leverage the power of the network to help un-break the data exchange process between providers and health plans," said Bush in a statement.
The company has already connected with technology firm Inovalon as part of the health plan data exchange service, which automates transfers of structured and unstructured clinical data from athenaClinicals to Inovalon on behalf of athenahealth's clients.
The new service extends athenahealth's work with payers, which includes medical billing process automation and managing populations under complex payment models with athenahealth Population Health.
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