4 Billion Dollars. Out of Your Pockets.

Hello,

I am Steven Murphy M.D.

I am a physician who has a medical practice that just began accepting insurance. I take the best care of my patients possible, but I am not getting paid what I deserve for what I do. Why? I don't know squat about Insurance Billing. If you are like most doctors, I am certain you don't either. But here's the good news. I am doing a deep dive into Medical Coding and Insurance Billing.

If the average Medical Coder gets paid 40-50k per year and the American Academy of Professional Coders has a membership base of 75,000 then I estimate that we are AT LEAST spending 4 Billion dollars on medical coding each and every year. Who pays those people? Doctors pay them a percentage of each and every bit of the sweat of their labor.

Why? Because they can fill out some web forms and follow up on our payments for us? Is that really worth 4-8 percent of your work?

I know primary care physicians going out of business. I bet they could have used that 4-8 percent over the lifetime of their practice.

I am committed to removing this layer of expense. It is my purpose, It is my aim to have you, the physician, learn everything about coding. Why? So that we can put that 4 billion dollars back in YOUR POCKETS.....

Here's my strategy and I just learned it from a group called Athena Health. They actually gave me the impetus to do this. They have 17,000 physicians signed up. Those physicians dump all of their EOBs, Denials etc into this huge database.

When a physician who has signed up with them goes to submit a claim, Athena's database prescreens the claim, looking to see if it meets all the "rules" from insurers....it then sends the claim on to insurers.

Sounds great right? Well, they actually told me it would cost me 10,000 USD to get started and then they would take 4-8 percent of my revenues for what they did. I said to the salesman, so you are basically a medical coding and billing service.....He said yes.

So even with the bells and whistles all that these people do is act like leeches and suck our blood.

So here's my take. We create this blog, open it up to anyone who wants to post about denials or issues with insurance.....we cover each others' backs. We alert others to things insurers do. Heck, if we have enough users, we can even create our own "open source" Athena which is "Free" to all users and contributors.....

We create Athena's database, without having to shell out any money. Just a little time to rant and rave.......and save healthcare's most neglected professional......The Doctor.

If you are interested about joining us, then email modifier25@gmail.com to get access to this blog!