Medical Billing Companies & Consultants in Cedar Rapids, IA

KASA Solutions, also known as KASA Practice Solutions, is a health IT and practice management company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It works only with behavioral and mental health providers. Its clients include psychologists, therapists, counselors and social workers, from solo private practices to large group practices with several locations. The company's goal is to help these clinicians open, expand and run their practices by taking over administrative work so they can spend more time with clients.

Billing and revenue cycle services

Billing is at the center of what KASA offers. Its team handles insurance claims from start to finish. Claims are checked inside KASA's own EHR before they go out, so fewer are rejected the first time. When an insurer rejects or denies a claim, KASA follows up and files appeals as needed. It also sends statements to patients who still owe co-pays or deductibles, and it can process those payments for the practice. The main services include:

• Full-service claims submission and validation
• Follow-up on rejected and denied claims
• Insurance claim appeals
• Insurance benefit verification
• Monthly patient statements and payment processing
• Financial reports on practice performance
• Contracting and credentialing with payers

Software built for behavioral health

KASA's services run on an EHR system it built in-house for mental health work. The web-based, HIPAA-compliant platform lets clinicians manage calendars across one or more offices, keep client records, write progress notes securely and review practice data with built-in reports.

Because billing is part of the same system, claims can be sent straight from it, and appointments link to each clinician's schedule. Listed features include unlimited storage, management tools, free training, a client-facing patient portal and an optional telehealth add-on. KASA added telehealth and updated its clinical documentation tools in 2019.

Front-office support

KASA also offers live phone answering and scheduling for mental health practices, which works like a remote reception desk. The company says it answers calls the way each practice wants them answered, and it can send clients appointment reminders. Practices can buy this service on its own or bundle it with billing.

How it works with clients

KASA prices its services to fit each practice and asks prospective clients to request a custom quote. Its most popular full-service plan is billed as a share of the revenue collected.

That plan includes EHR access, the billing features, phone answering, benefit verification, follow-up on denials, appeals, patient statements, reports, unlimited EHR user accounts, patient portal access and a dedicated account manager. Every plan comes with unlimited support, including help learning the system, resolving claim problems and handling scheduling questions.

Instead of a general call center, each client gets an account manager who learns how that practice operates.

KASA traces its roots to 2009, when local mental health professionals in Cedar Rapids saw a need for electronic record keeping, and it was formally founded in 2012. Since then it has served mental health providers around the country. Buyers comparing billing firms may want to note that KASA combines billing, its own behavioral health EHR, reception services and credentialing under one provider that focuses only on mental health.

Medical Group Solutions is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, company that handles revenue cycle and back-office functions for medical practices. It operates as an independent entity, yet it maintains an official tie to Physicians' Clinic of Iowa (PCI), a large regional organization of doctors practicing across many specialties. The firm's reach extends well beyond its home area. Practices in any state may engage its services, so it serves distant groups as readily as those close to Cedar Rapids.

Services offered

Its work centers on the financial and operational side of running a practice. The main service is preparing, submitting and following up on insurance claims for physicians, paired with broader operational guidance for everyday clinic management.

The company organizes its engagements around three goals: improving how an office functions day to day, recovering more revenue for care that has already been provided, and helping the practice grow. Practices comparing vendors should view this company as a combined billing and operations resource, not merely a claims processor.

• Revenue cycle and claims handling for medical offices and physician groups
• Operational guidance and oversight support for practices
• Plans aimed at raising practice revenue
• Finding and removing duplicated steps within office procedures
• Cutting overhead that serves no real purpose
• Support when a practice opens new lines of care

Approach to client practices

The company reports that it has worked through many kinds of operational situations, from growth initiatives to ordinary day-to-day obstacles. This background has equipped it with hands-on expertise in lifting revenue, streamlining duplicated effort and eliminating costs that add no value.

In practice, the firm examines an office's entire workflow instead of focusing narrowly on claims, looking for places where money or staff time is being lost. Its published materials do not name the software it uses for billing, the specialties it works with or how its contracts are structured, so practices considering the firm should ask about these points directly.

History and connection to PCI

What distinguishes the firm from many rival vendors is its tie to Physicians' Clinic of Iowa. PCI was founded in Cedar Rapids in 1997 and describes itself as an independent group owned by its local physicians rather than by a hospital system or outside corporation.

Its medical staff numbers above eighty clinicians, spanning surgical and nonsurgical specialists along with advanced practice clinicians. The group covers orthopedics, otolaryngology, urology, neurology, hematology and oncology, pediatrics, family medicine, general and vascular surgery, diagnostic imaging and other services.

PCI's main campus is made up of two medical pavilions on 10th Street SE within Cedar Rapids' Medical Quarter, and the group also staffs outreach clinics in nearby towns.

Because of this affiliation with a busy multi-specialty organization, the firm's operational expertise comes from a group that runs its own clinics, an imaging center, an outpatient surgery facility and in-house patient billing. Practices looking for a revenue and operations partner rooted in doctor-led care may count this background as a useful consideration when weighing their choices.

Before signing on, interested practices should confirm the firm's current staff size, how it reports results and what its onboarding steps involve by checking with the company itself.

The rehabmgmt.com domain now leads to a firm presenting itself as Revenue Cycle Solutions, an outsourced healthcare billing and revenue cycle partner for specialty medical practices that want to grow. It says its approach works for any specialty. Its client base includes physical therapy and occupational therapy clinics, physician offices, multi-specialty groups, behavioral health providers and other provider-based organizations.

Practices with unstable receivables, uneven cash flow, repeat denials or falling revenue per visit are the clearest fit for what it offers.

Services

The firm covers the full claim lifecycle and adds optional work at the front end of the revenue cycle. Its main offerings include:

• Setup before go-live: building a history of practice data, connecting systems, and configuring ERA and EDI
• Claim submission, claim status checks and accounts receivable management
• Handling denials and recovering underpaid claims
• Payment posting, processing patient responsibility, patient statements, and answering patient questions about statements
• Reports at the end of each month
• Optional services: payer credentialing for providers and locations, benefit verification, pre-authorization, and follow-up on older receivables
• Analytics: administrative KPIs, production figures, outcome metrics and benchmarking against its own internal measures

How engagements work

New relationships start with a free assessment. A non-disclosure agreement is signed first. The firm then gathers six to twelve months of practice history and reviews every claim older than 30 days. The assessment covers insurance and patient aging, revenue per visit, days outstanding, payer mix and similar measures.

The practice gets a written report that the team walks through with it. If both sides see a good fit, a longer improvement partnership follows. If not, the practice keeps the findings.

The firm's approach centers on a concept it calls Revenue Cycle Complexity. These are problems that add billing time and put payment at risk, such as gaps in registration, authorization or documentation, payer rules, and EMR or clearinghouse configuration. According to its own claim data, most of these problems start inside the practice rather than in billing.

So the team measures them, sets billing staff time to match the actual workload, and works with the practice to fix causes at the source. It says its fees drop as complexity is reduced, so it has no reason to keep problems in place.

Background and leadership

The founder and CEO, Robert M. Kowalick, Jr., PT, began as a hospital physical therapist. He then built Optimax Physical Therapy into a seven-location practice with more than 150 employees and later sold it to NovaCare. He started the billing company in 1998 under the name Reimbursement Specialists. Over time it moved from basic billing to an outcome-based model.

President Dan Loch previously led EZClaim and Eye Cloud Pro and holds engineering degrees and an MBA from Oakland University. A sister company, Ascend Solutions, owns the Practice Data Solutions platform, which records how long billing tasks take and turns that into the firm's complexity data.

Buyers wanting a billing partner run by clinicians and led by data, particularly in therapy, may find this model worth comparing.