ClaimTek Medical Billing Success Stories
Karen Jeghers
From 0 to 7 Clients in Nothing Flat
Who doesn’t love a success story? In this issue, we salute Karen Jeghers, of Compliant
Billing Services, LLC in Carver, MA, who went into medical billing in the Fall of
2000, and today has seven clients and two employees.
Karen’s background as a Physician’s Assistant (PA) was clearly a bonus in helping
her land her first clients. Having worked for 13 years in a doctor’s office, she
already had a sound knowledge of medical coding and billing issues. But the irony
is that her first client was not the doctor for whom she was working, but rather
a completely unknown doctor to whom she had sent an advertising brochure several
months earlier. This doctor was unhappy with his current medical billing service
and signed up with Karen in January, 2001, becoming her first client after only
a few months in business.
Like many entrepreneurs, Karen went into medical billing because she wanted to be
more available for her family of four children. But her real impetus came from working
as a PA, where she saw how poorly a large billing service was handling her boss’s
accounts. “The doctor was having many denied or underpaid claims because the service
was simply doing the billing, but not providing feedback to him about what was happening,”
she explained. “I could tell he was losing money because of incorrect or mismatched
coding that should have been caught by this service, but they focused only on doing
the keyboarding, never giving him any feedback on problems.”
As a result, Karen saw an opportunity to specialize her service in medical coding
and practice issues. While her former employer didn’t want to switch to her service,
he did hire her as a consultant to his office staff to improve their coding skills
and ensure that his longtime service was no longer costing him income.
Karen’s experience and specialized knowledge have paid off greatly. Between the
Fall of 2001 and January 2002, she added six new doctors to her company’s roster.
Rather than charging on a per claim basis, she charges 6% or 7% of insurance reimbursements,
but her clients are happy to pay given the services Karen provides. For most clients,
Karen’s company submits electronic claims, posts payments, produces patient statements,
handles billing inquiries by phone, performs soft collections, and provides standard
account aging and practice analysis reports. For additional fees, she also does
Evaluation/Management (E/M) auditing and provider education on coding issues, as
well as designing superbills and templated progress notes. Her clients include doctors
in a wide range of fields, including internal medicine, physical therapy, occupational
therapy, cardiology, and neurology.
Karen is extremely pleased to be working with ClaimTek. She commends ClaimTek’s
exceptional responsiveness to her questions as she learned how to build her business
and land her accounts. She also has nothing but praise for ClaimTek’s professional
trainers who helped her many times through difficult issues.
No doubt about it, Karen is an exceptional ClaimTek success story and an inspiration
to anyone owning or seeking to own a medical billing business.