Patients Are Powerful

By Ventura Chiropractor

A medical billing company is trying its hand at patient advocacy. “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. 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 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. 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. At first, the company considered making Universal a nonprofit organization, but decided to keep it under the umbrella of Strategic. There is a low profit margin, he said, especially because Universal’s main customers are coming in with bills they’d like audited. 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. The company also wants to move to the national level and is working with national companies to provide the patient advocate service. “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.”