Medical Billing Companies & Consultants in Woodland Hills, CA

STAT Medical Consulting, Inc. is a medical billing and coding firm based in Woodland Hills, California, in the San Fernando Valley. The company says it has handled billing for healthcare providers since 1994. It presents itself as a revenue cycle partner for practices that would rather hand off claims work than build their own billing department. It serves clients in the Los Angeles area and also takes on accounts nationwide.

Who they work with

Its clients range from individual physicians to large organizations. According to its website, it supports:

• Solo practitioners and small physician groups
• Large medical practices and employed-physician practices
• Hospitals, including stand-alone facilities
• Ambulatory and outpatient surgery centers
• Ambulance and EMS providers
• Home health agencies
• Federal, state and county health departments
• Independent contractors

The firm says it covers a wide range of specialties, from anesthesia, cardiology and dermatology to radiology, urology and vascular surgery. It has dedicated pages for internal medicine, orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, and allergy and immunology. It also lists experience with burn centers, gamma knife programs, sleep disorder clinics and physical therapy.

Services and process

Its core services are claim preparation and electronic submission, professional coding with ICD-10 and CPT assignment, insurance follow-up, denial analysis and appeals, recovery of receivables more than 120 days old, and regular financial reporting. For internal medicine clients, the firm describes a seven-step workflow:

• Checking eligibility and authorizations before the visit
• Capturing charges and assigning E/M levels and modifiers
• Checking claims against payer rules before they are sent
• Posting payments against remittances and flagging underpayments
• Tracing denials to their root cause and appealing them
• Pursuing older unpaid balances
• Sending a monthly report on clean claim rate, days in A/R, denial rate and net collections

It also handles workers' compensation and no-fault claims. For consulting, STAT uses a Report Card assessment that reviews billing, staffing and overhead, then recommends changes where a practice is weak. Its site also has a calculator that estimates the cost of in-house billing as a share of collections.

Technology

The company's billing work runs on Tebra (formerly Kareo). It mentions Tebra tools such as IntelliClaims, which helps prevent repeat denials, and electronic superbills. Practices can either adopt its cloud-based practice management and integrated EMR/EHR platform, which handles scheduling, registration, billing and reporting, or keep their current system. STAT says it can work inside a client's existing software or convert data from other platforms.

Background and performance claims

STAT stresses HIPAA compliance and says its coders are AAPC-certified. It publishes its own performance targets, including a turnaround of 7 to 14 days, about 95 percent first-pass claim accuracy, about 95 percent collection efficiency and a 30 percent average drop in accounts receivable. These figures are self-reported. Client testimonials on its site describe faster payments and lower receivables after switching to the firm.