Kate Basile has spent her entire career in health care, managing a variety of operations related to medical diagnostic services. Although she has a degree in medical laboratory science and a great deal of management experience, she wasn’t prepared for the new direction her life took in October 2010. “My husband, Richard Basile, MD, had spent 25 years with a large vascular surgery practice. He decided he wanted to specialize in vein care and venous disease, and left the group to set up his own office during the last quarter of 2010,” she recounts. “I was pretty much thrown into the role of serving as his office manager.”

With her background in operations, Kate knew what to do to set up the new office. Handling the billing was another matter. “I was kind of naïve at first, but I knew we wanted to handle the claims processing in-house. When a friend in information technology told me about Kareo and I began to research it, it was a no-brainer to me. I knew I didn’t want to deal with servers and upgrades and back-ups. I didn’t want to risk losing data.

“And at the time I was doing the analysis, it was uncertain if I needed to be in the office every day. With Kareo, I could handle the billing from anywhere—I didn’t have to be in the office to get the claims out. With the month-to-month arrangement, there was no risk. After I saw all that Kareo offered, I never even considered other systems. We have been very happy with the decision.”

Kate spent two weeks training with the online tutorials that all Kareo clients can access on their own schedule. “I also took one of the webcasts,” she says. “But I preferred the video training because you could stop it if you wanted to review a feature, or go back to it later.

“I made some mistakes in the beginning on the billing, due mainly to my unfamiliarity with the more esoteric processes involved in billing for some surgeries. But what I really like about Kareo is, the system is the same whether you are entering information on a patient, insurance company or new provider. You use the exact same process and once you learn what that process is, you can do almost anything with it.” Kate easily handles the 150 claims submitted each week on her own but with the practice thriving, she plans to add additional staff.

There are still challenges, however, that are inherent in any billing operation. Kate advises, “I found that the learning curve on handling denied claims is steep. It helps to separate your reasons for denials and spend your time addressing the main reasons for what went wrong. For instance, I found that many of our claim denials were due to the referral being improperly requested or documented. But I don’t even bother with eligibility because in our practice, most of our patients have already been verified by our referral sources. You have to figure out where to spend your time perfecting the process.”

How do Kate and Dr. Basile feel about the decision to take his practice in a new direction? “We’re feeling really good about it,” she states. “There was a lot of uncertainty at first but six months into it, we have more patients than we know what to do with! Going with Kareo means there’s one less headache I need to worry about in managing a growing practice.”

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