WATERTOWN, MA – Aetna ranks No. 1 in business dealings with physicians, according to athenahealth's PayerView rankings.

Among other performance criteria that put Aetna in the top spot, athenahealth found that the insurer pays claims faster than any other national payer.

Last year's No. 1 payer was CIGNA Healthcare.

Athenahealth, which provides Web-based services for physician practices, and Physicians Practice, a practice management journal for physicians, released the third annual PayerView Rankings Thursday.

This year's rankings used athenahealth claims performance data from more than 12,000 medical providers representing more than 30 million medical charge lines in 2007.

The data is derived from athenahealth's national on-demand athenaNet system database and ranks health insurers according to specific measures of financial, administrative performance and medical policy complexity. Athenahealth evaluated 137 national, regional and government payers.

The rankings include national payers with at least 120,000 charge lines of data, regional payers with a minimum of 20,000 charge lines and medical services billed from 39 states to payers in 45 states.