For Tracy Bowers, moving to a new medical billing software seemed so intimidating, she put it off until it was no longer an option. Her company, Med-Bill in North Carolina, was doing a brisk business but her software could not keep up.

“We had a lot of problems with our electronic claims,” she says. “They were not making it to the insurance companies. And the only way we knew was when our clients would tell us they weren’t getting paid. We were fighting fires all the time.” The thought of moving 28 practices onto a new computer system seemed like too mammoth of a conversion to Tracy. “But I realized if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have a business much longer,” she recalls.

Tracy had held onto a Kareo flyer for a year and a half before that point when she decided to explore new software in earnest. “I’d looked at several, but none seemed designed for billing services,” she notes. Kareo was clearly designed for medical billing in a practice environment or an off-site billing office. Tracy decided to go with Kareo while putting a “method to her madness.” She started small, converting only four practices at first, using her most experienced billers to manage the conversion. She then used those billers to serve as trainers for the rest of the staff. “The learning curve was minimal,” she notes.

Within six months using an incremental approach, all of her clients had successfully converted to Kareo. Their revenue began to improve dramatically and no one saw a decrease in payments. In less than two weeks after the first conversion, Tracy knew the electronic claims problem was fixed. She soon found that Kareo also offered other solutions to problems she’d been having with her old system.

“Document storage and management was a problem for us. Kareo enabled our practices to scan their documents on the front end and send them electronically to my office to be worked. They never even become a piece of paper in my office. With the few practices that are still sending us paper, we scan on the back end and store them that way. We have eliminated incoming paper to our office by 80%, and document storage in our office by 100%.”

Five years after converting to Kareo, Tracy handles 43 clients in seven states. She has sixteen employees who billed nearly $30 million on behalf of her clients in 2011. “I could not have even imagined building my business to this degree in my old software environment,” she says. “We were always operating in a state of chaos.” Not anymore.

Tracy harnesses Kareo’s workflow management tools on a daily basis to keep things on track. “Kareo has three wonderful features that help us: the ‘To Do’ list, Track Claims Status, and Task Manager. If you are using all three of those features every day, it is impossible for things to slip through the cracks. In very short order, you will also see improved outcomes in AR, income, your key indicators, payment velocity--all the facets of your core business will fall into place. It’s been amazing to watch how much our outcomes have improved. “

Kareo also provides enhanced functionality she never knew existed. “For a medical billing service like mine, file maintenance was an issue because we handle data for multiple tax IDs,” she notes. “Before Kareo, we had 28 different tax IDs that all had their own list of insurance code files, procedure code files and diagnosis code files. Kareo has a great feature that allows all those tax IDs to share just one core consolidated set of files among all tax IDs. That has greatly improved our file maintenance system.”

Tracy is convinced that Kareo was the right decision, and her fears of a messy conversion were groundless. “From the time we made the switch, we have never had a problem,” she notes. Kareo was the best business decision we ever made.”

← Back to All Case Studies