Medical Billing Companies & Consultants in Martinez, CA

Founded in 1987 and based in Pacheco, a community in Contra Costa County to the east of Oakland, the Howe firm handles reimbursement for medical practices and advises them on operations, working with clients both locally and at a distance.

Its customers range from solo physicians to groups with several providers, and its central job is collecting the professional fees those clinicians earn. The pitch to doctors is simple: hand off the paperwork of getting paid, spend the recovered hours with patients, and rely on evidence-driven recommendations to make the practice leaner and more profitable.

Services

No two engagements look exactly alike. The team shapes its work around each client's circumstances, proposing additional help where it would make a difference and eliminating tasks that do not earn their keep. Most of what it provides can be grouped under three headings:

• Planning: evaluating and reworking encounter forms and other charge-entry tools, refreshing procedure and diagnosis codes (CPT and ICD-10) every year along with modifiers and RVUs, and studying the practice's fee schedule.
• Processing: sending claims to payers, assigning codes for surgical procedures, reviewing patient ledgers for accuracy, managing deposits to the bank, and running a courier service that collects and delivers office documents.
• Reporting: a financial and productivity summary each month, breakdowns of reimbursement patterns by insurer, and annual preparation of 1099 schedules.

How They Work With Clients

The firm's first line of defense against lost revenue is avoiding rejections before they happen, drawing on a detailed grasp of carrier requirements and federal and state rules. When a claim still comes back denied or sits unpaid, staff stay on it until the practice receives what it is owed for the care delivered.

Team members try to build a genuine working relationship with each office, point out process improvements when they spot them, and keep track of the particular habits and procedures of each insurer. In exchange, the company expects practices to share information candidly and without delay, and it commits to being equally forthcoming on any subject.

Management also lays out a handful of operating habits for its own people: verify that a task is finished instead of taking it for granted, distinguish what is known from what is merely presumed, own up to errors and fix them quickly, and agree on common vocabulary so that terms such as coding carry the same meaning for the billing team and the clinic's staff.

Background and Values

The company takes its name from the initials of Jerry T. Howe, who launched it after holding a vice-president role at Children's Hospital Oakland and the research institute connected to it.

From the start, his goal was billing help of such quality that physicians could put their attention on the people they treat, and the firm states that this purpose remains its guide today. Four principles anchor its culture: honesty, empathy, dedication and openness.

The company acknowledges the money worries that weigh on doctors, including student debt, liability insurance costs, office expenses and the difficulty of collecting payment in a tightly regulated industry, and it presents its services as one way to ease that load.

Practices weighing different billing providers may note several things that set this firm apart: more than three decades in business without interruption, a hands-on model built around personal relationships, and responsibilities that extend past claim filing into code maintenance, fee review and financial reports. One physician who has used the firm for many years, Dr.

John Griffin, offers a testimonial expressing gratitude for the reliable billing support he has received over a long period and for the team's willingness to keep handling an account of modest size.