Practices that actively monitor their billing reports collect 11–14% more net revenue than those that review data only when a problem surfaces, according to MGMA's 2023 Cost and Revenue Survey. Most athenahealth users have access to the data that would surface those gaps — they just aren't reading it systematically. This post explains which athenahealth reports matter most, what each one is actually telling you, and where most practice owners misread the signals.
Why Most Practices Misread Their athenahealth Data
athenahealth generates dozens of standard reports. The problem isn't access — it's that the default report library is built for billers, not for owners or administrators trying to make operational decisions. A practice manager opening the Aging Summary for the first time sees columns of numbers organized by payer and bucket. Without a frame of reference, those numbers don't mean anything actionable.
The result is a predictable pattern: owners glance at total collections, assume things are fine if the number is close to last month, and move on. Meanwhile, denial rates quietly climb, aging buckets shift toward 90–120 days, and net collection rate erodes by two or three percentage points before anyone notices. By the time the cash flow problem is visible, the underlying cause is three months old.
This isn't a technology problem. athenahealth surfaces the data. The gap is in knowing which reports to open, in what order, and how to interpret what you're seeing against a real benchmark — not just against your own prior month.
The Benchmark: What Your Key Metrics Should Actually Look Like
MGMA and HFMA publish consistent guidance on the metrics that separate high-performing practices from median performers. Net collection rate — the percentage of allowable charges actually collected after contractual adjustments — should sit at or above 95% for a well-run practice. First-pass denial rate should be below 5%. Days in A/R should be under 35 for most specialties, though primary care tends to run lower and procedural specialties can run slightly higher.
These aren't aspirational numbers. They're the ranges that practices in the top quartile of MGMA's benchmarking data actually hit. If your athenahealth reports are showing a net collection rate below 92%, a denial rate above 8%, or days in A/R above 50, you have a quantifiable revenue leak — and the reports will tell you exactly where it's coming from if you know where to look. Our revenue cycle analytics service is built specifically around surfacing these figures in a format practice owners can act on.
What Good Looks Like When You're Actually Reading the Reports
A well-run practice reviews four core reports on a weekly cadence: the A/R Aging Summary, the Denial Rate by Payer report, the Net Collection Rate report, and the Procedure Volume Summary. Each one answers a different question. Aging tells you where money is stuck. Denial rate tells you why claims are failing. Net collection rate tells you whether you're capturing what payers owe you. Procedure volume tells you whether your coding is keeping up with clinical activity.
The practices that use these reports well don't just pull them — they track them over time. A denial rate of 6% this month is meaningless without knowing whether it was 4% last month or 9%. The trend is the signal. Good practices build a simple month-over-month comparison, by payer, and treat any movement of more than one percentage point as a trigger for review. They also segment by provider, because a practice-level average can mask one provider whose documentation habits are generating a disproportionate share of denials.
Specialty matters in how you read these benchmarks. A surgical practice with high-cost procedures will naturally carry a longer A/R tail than a primary care group. MGMA's specialty-specific benchmarks account for this — which is why using the correct peer group is critical when you evaluate your own numbers. Our provider productivity analytics work includes wRVU tracking alongside billing performance to make sure the two sides of the equation are always read together.
How to Improve the Way Your Practice Uses athenahealth Reports
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Start with the A/R Aging Summary, filtered by payer. Pull this weekly, not monthly. Sort by the 90–120 day bucket first — that's where recoverable revenue is most at risk of becoming a write-off. Two sentences of action: identify the top three payers in that bucket and flag any claim sitting there without a follow-up note in the system.
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Set a denial rate threshold and treat breaches as incidents. If your first-pass denial rate crosses 5%, that's not a billing team problem to handle quietly — it's an operational alert. Assign one person to produce a root-cause summary within 48 hours, categorized by denial reason code, so you can distinguish coding issues from eligibility failures from authorization gaps.
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Compare net collection rate by payer, not just in aggregate. A blended net collection rate can look acceptable while one or two payers quietly underpay. Pull the Net Collection Rate by Payer report monthly and flag any payer where your rate is more than three percentage points below your best-performing payer. That gap is often a contracting issue, not a billing issue.
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Use the Procedure Volume report to catch undercoding. If a provider's wRVU output is flat or declining but their schedule is full, the most common cause is undercoding — documenting complexity that isn't being captured in the CPT submitted. Cross-reference visit volume with average RVU per visit, and compare against MGMA's specialty benchmarks. Our practice analytics system automates this comparison daily.
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Build a one-page weekly dashboard from these four reports. athenahealth allows report exports — but most practices don't aggregate them into a single view. A consolidated weekly snapshot covering A/R aging, denial rate, net collection rate, and volume takes about 20 minutes to build manually, or can be automated through a connected dashboard. That single document is what transforms data access into data-driven decisions.
The Analytics Angle: Visibility Is the Intervention
The practices that close the gap between their current performance and MGMA top-quartile benchmarks rarely do it by hiring more billing staff. They do it by building visibility into what's already happening. When you can see your denial rate by payer in real time, you don't need to wait for a quarterly billing audit to find out you have a Medicare documentation problem — you catch it in week two and fix it before it compounds.
athenahealth reports contain most of what you need. The gap is in how those reports are structured, filtered, and presented to decision-makers. If you want to know where your practice currently stands against industry benchmarks before making any changes, our free Practice Health Score gives you a structured read on your billing performance, volume, and A/R in about five minutes. For practices ready to move beyond manual report pulls, our Practice Analytics System connects directly to your athenahealth data and surfaces these metrics in a live dashboard built for owners and administrators.