Dr. Arthur Weinreb is a podiatrist in New Rochelle, NY who has been in practice for 20 years. Reina Perdomo, Office Manager, has been with Dr. Weinreb for 19 years of those years and had been using the same billing company for 15. With the healthcare industry trend of moving practices to an electronic medical record, Dr. Weinreb and Reina began looking at practice management systems in 2010. She had heard about Practice Fusion and when she and the doctor saw a demo of it, they signed on. Reina decided at the time that they needed a different billing solution that would work with it. That’s when she opted to look into Kareo, which integrates seamlessly with Practice Fusion.

“We had been using paper charts before we moved onto Practice Fusion,” she says. For years, Reina had to manually enter patient and encounter information into two different systems in order to get bills out the door—which in their case, involved a dial-up connection for each claim sent. The practice sees on average 125 patients a week.

“It was very time consuming to send claims, because sometimes I had to call back or re-dial the number,” she recalls. When she looked into Kareo, she thought it might be the answer to their billing needs. Dr. Weinreb agreed to give it a try, since the month-to-month arrangement meant there were no lengthy contracts to lock them in long-term if Kareo didn’t meet their needs.

That was a year and a half ago, and they haven’t looked back. "It was a nice, easy transition from one billing system to the other,” Reina says, impressed by how quickly the practice was up and running on Kareo. “There was always someone to answer any questions I had, either by live chat, email or phone. On our old system, we were paying almost $200 a month for support that I rarely used and when I did, I had to wait a long time for an answer.” Reina says her primary concern during the switchover was continuity in cash flow and says, “We never saw a drop in revenue during the transition.”

They also liked the pricing. Reina says they were paying a lot more for their old service and did not get even half of the time-saving features that she enjoys with Kareo. For instance, they worked out a system where Dr. Weinreb enters the patient encounter information, including codes, into Practice Fusion so there is no longer a need to generate superbills. The process actually saves the doctor time because he’s putting information such as codes and notes into the system as he’s seeing the patient. The process also allows him to capture all the services he can bill for whereas before, there may have been items such as x-rays that were forgotten because coding was done long after the patient appointment.

“The bill gets sent directly from Practice Fusion to Kareo, which is great. I no longer have to enter each claim. All I need to do is check the bill in Kareo to make sure everything is correct, approve it, then send it out. If something appears incorrect in Kareo, a pop-up window will warn me. Before, it took me at least half a day to send bills out. Now it’s only an hour—Kareo saves me a lot of time. I blink and it’s done.” Reina also likes that fact that ERAs are sent directly into the system, so she no longer has to check each EOB and manually enter each and every individual claim into the system.

Overall, Reina estimates that Kareo has saved her 60 percent of the time she used to spend before on billing. That frees her up to concentrate on other pressing office issues. Dr. Weinreb adds that payments are coming in much more quickly than before. He notes, “Kareo has saved us quite a bit of time and has been very efficient for our practice."

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