Medical billing company expands into patient advocacy

By Nicole Lucht

Friday, Feb. 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

A medical billing company is trying its hand at patient advocacy.

Strategic Collection Management wanted to contribute to the U.S. health care reform, Chief Executive Chris Gitersonke said.

“We felt a little bit unfilled doing (billing for providers) and wanted to really help patients,” he said. “Our main focus is to represent a patient if they have an issue on a medical bill. It’s kind of insurance for your insurance to make sure that you paid correctly.

“Health care reform is such an obviously needed action, but nobody knows how do you do it,” he said. “Do you do it on this huge national scale and change everything? ... So this is our way of doing it on a local level.”

When the company started, it had two employees and has since grown to 35.

The Las Vegas-based company has its offices on West Sahara Avenue near Buffalo Drive.

“We’ve done a good job and hired a lot of people here,” he said. “We feel like we’re making a good impact on things.”

The company decided to roll out Universal Solutions as a unit that will serve as a patient-advocate business beginning last month.

“We thought, ‘What’s the cheapest way we can do this and yet provide the kind of service we want to provide?’ ” he said.

For $25 a month, the company goes to bat for the health care consumer, looking over bills and working with doctors and insurance companies to fix overcharges. The fee covers up to five people in a household.

At first, the company considered making Universal a nonprofit organization, but decided to keep it under the umbrella of Strategic.

Universal has primarily signed up senior citizens on Medicare.

“They tend to be the ones with the most issues with their medical bills,” Gitersonke said.

There is a low profit margin, he said, especially because Universal’s main customers are coming in with bills they’d like audited. That makes it more time intensive, he said. The opportunity to make money is with employers, who Gitersonke would like see offer this benefit to their employees.

There’s a “huge” cost savings for employer, too, he said. Besides alleviating human resource staff from employees’ questions about particular health insurance issues, if Universal corrects medical billing problems, the cost to the company and the employee can be cut through reduced expenditures. Universal also offers employers workers’ compensation containment, another area of potential fraud or incorrect billing.

“We take all of that pressure off the employer,” Gitersonke said.

The company also wants to move to the national level and is working with national companies to provide the patient advocate service.

“That’s our contribution to health care reform,” Gitersonke said. “It’s going to manage the cost of the employer, it’s going to manage the cost of the patient and the insurance company. There is so much fraudulent billing going on, too, that when we’re auditing stuff, we can see that.”