Medical Biller Develops Special Ranking System For Insurers
Jonathan Bush recognized that getting paid in health care is a problem, NPR's Planet Money blog reports: "Say the patient is covered by Blue Cross. Which Blue Cross? Did she need a referral? What's the right billing code?" So he left the birthing center business to get "into a different part of the health-care business: He launched athenahealth, a company that handles billing for doctors' offices." He process $1 billion a year in paper checks, and about twice that much in electronic payments. Not all insurers are equally hard to work with according to Bush, who is President George W. Bush's cousin. He's developed a nifty "pain-in-the-butt index" to rank them. It is available on the company's website (Kestenbaum, 7/1).
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