Bob Pedersen, RLP Medical Billing: My philosophy is, take time, at the time, to get it right the first time. Kareo makes that easy for billing professionals.
With over 22 years in the medical billing profession, Bob Pedersen knows what he doesn’t want in a software.
“I was sick of our in-house billing system,” says Bob, who previously served as Vice President of another billing service in Kansas City for over 19 years. “We were spending way too much time on back-ups, restarts, data recovery and a stream of programmers ‘customizing’ our program. We lived in constant fear of power outages and data loss. The downtime totally diverted us from our core business and performing well for our clients.”
Bob and his wife decided to end their misery and open their own billing company in 2007 when his prior employer refused to consider moving to a cloud-based system.
“I had spent a lot of time looking at alternative systems,” he explains. “I saw that software-as-a-service was the only way to go. When I tried Kareo, it was obvious the software had been written by someone who’d done billing and found some brilliant solutions to nagging problems. Kareo was the clincher for us when deciding to open our own company.”
The Pedersens haven’t been disappointed. “We started with one cardiologist who came over with us, and he saw an immediate 20 percent increase in receipts,” Bob notes. Nearly four years later, RLP Medical Billing handles 16 providers and collects upwards of $5 million a year on their behalf.
“Some of our other new clients have seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in income sustained over time,” he states. That impressive track record has made word-of-mouth referrals his biggest source of new business—with 50 percent of those new clients coming over from the old company Bob left. He credits Kareo for helping to make RLP Billing more efficient.
“We bill with four employees what would have taken eight billers under our old system,” he says. “Kareo’s claim scrubbing and interactive reporting have been a blessing. We don’t have to waste time with manual claims reconciliation. It only takes me an hour to review the unpaid claims report, whereas before I would have spent hours poring over stacks of ledgers.” His philosophy of taking the time, at the time, to get it right the first time has paid off. “Our claims rejections are running at one quarter of one percent,” he notes.
Bob also believes in using experienced billers, rather than hiring newbies. “Kareo doesn’t replace someone who has done all aspects of billing before. We hire people who’ve already made mistakes and made them all before. I’ve seen intelligent people who just couldn’t grasp the idiosyncracies of billing. Experienced billers know that investing a little time up front, like in scanning face sheets into the patient account documents, will save a lot of time in the long run.”
What does Bob feel that billing professionals should know if they are considering making a change? “With the resources and reports Kareo provides, anyone can get started on their SAAS at a fraction of what they’ve been paying. Kareo will let you experiment with the system before you make a decision—that transparency really impressed me. And it’s easier to get started with Kareo—their training webinars are great. In over three years, we’ve only had 30 minutes of downtime and that was when a guy chopped a cable down the street! We’re the same people we were at our old company, but we’re so much more effective with Kareo.”
