AthenaOne Year-End Closeout Checklist for Quality Reporting

Five tasks every athenaOne practice should run before December 31 to close the quality reporting year cleanly. Each one takes under 30 minutes and prevents a Q1 surprise during MIPS submission or contract reconciliation.

1. Reconcile your quality measure denominators

Open the Quality Management Reporting workspace and run the year-to-date denominator report for each of your selected MIPS measures. Look for two things:

• Patients flagged for the denominator who shouldn't be — usually a coding or status error that's pulling in non-eligible patients.
• Patients missing from the denominator who should be in it — usually a problem-list omission or an inactive flag that was set incorrectly.

Either pattern, caught now, is fixable. The same error caught in March is a submission problem.

2. Run the Care Gap report for AWVs

Annual Wellness Visit gaps are the single most common end-of-year miss inside athenaOne practices. Pull the AWV care gap report for your Medicare panel. Patients who are AWV-eligible and unfilled at year-end represent immediate Q1 scheduling opportunities and, depending on your contract structure, recoverable revenue. The $300K most practices are missing almost always shows up here.

3. Check your Direct Messaging audit trail

The MIPS Promoting Interoperability category includes a Direct Messaging numerator. Pull the audit trail for the year and confirm the count matches what your dashboard reports. Discrepancies are usually traceable to inbox routing changes mid-year. If the numerator is light, December still gives you time to send qualifying messages.

4. Review the Insurance Reporting workspace for credentialing drift

Athena's Insurance Reporting will show you which payers paid which providers. If a provider's credentialing lapsed with a payer mid-year, you'll see it as a sudden zero in the second half of the year. Catching it now means you can re-credential before Q1 claims start denying.

5. Export and archive the year's submitted data

Run a full Custom Reports export of the year's encounters, charges, and quality data and archive it outside athenaOne. Two reasons: it's your own data and you should have a copy independent of any vendor; and if a 2026 question requires comparing to 2025, you don't want to depend on athenaNet's historical query performance.

The bigger picture

athenaOne is one of the better EHRs for ambulatory analytics — the data is accessible, the reports are workable, the API is documented. But the year-end ritual above is still manual at most practices. Vizier's athenaOne connector pulls the data continuously, so the questions above are answerable any day of the year, not just at year-end.