A Raven Health alternative for agencies with a biller

How Raven Health and MegAligna approach billing

Raven bundles its software with an optional revenue-cycle service, so it can bill on your behalf. MegAligna is built for the opposite arrangement: most small and mid-size agencies already have a biller they trust, so the product’s job is to hand that biller complete, clean charge data — per-session CSV, a CMS-1500 PDF and a superbill, with per-payer NPI and modifier configuration. No percentage of collections is taken, because collections never pass through this system.

Agencies that want a vendor to take billing off their hands entirely are better served by Raven’s managed service. The comparison below is for practices keeping billing in-house or with an outside biller.

Raven Health vs MegAligna: feature comparison

What per-learner pricing does at re-authorization time

Raven publishes three arrangements: a Data Collection Standalone plan at $29 per learner per month for software only, a Managed Billing Premium plan with no software fee that charges 5% of the claims Raven collects on your behalf, and a custom Self-Billing plan. Raven states there are no client minimums, and that the $500 implementation fee on the Premium plan is currently waived.

The 5% plan is the one to model carefully. It costs nothing up front, which is why Raven reports most startups choosing it, but it scales with collections rather than with headcount: a growing agency pays more for the same software as its billing grows.

A per-learner bill has the opposite problem. It rises with every admitted client regardless of staffing, so the software bill grows exactly when authorization workload grows. Per-seat pricing holds while the same team absorbs a larger caseload, and an outside biller’s login costs nothing here because biller seats are free.

Three shapes, against both of Raven’s published plans. The 5% column assumes monthly collections, which is the number that decides it:

Two things fall out of that, and only one of them favours us.

The 5% plan is never the cheapest of the three at these volumes — but it bundles billing as a service, which the other two columns do not. Comparing it to software-only pricing is comparing a bill to a bill and not a service to a service: if it replaces a biller you currently pay, the honest comparison is 5% against that person’s cost, not against $20 a seat.

The staff-heavy row goes to Raven’s software-only plan, $290 against $500, and it will for any agency carrying far more clinicians than learners. Per-seat pricing rewards a caseload that grows faster than the team; it penalises the reverse.

If this gets as far as a migration plan, switching from Raven Health covers what the importer accepts, what happens to an authorization mid-period, and the order to cut over in.