This month Outsource Receivables Inc. had the opportunity to interview Kevin Weinstein, Vice President of Zirmed, a major medical billing clearinghouse.
Since 1999, Zirmed has offered healthcare revenue cycle management and technology solutions to hospitals and healthcare providers nationwide. Addressing the full healthcare revenue cycle, Zirmed’s solutions help simplify the complexities of healthcare payments. Currently, Zirmed works with 115,000 healthcare facilities across the county ranging in size from large hospitals to sole proprietor practices. Processing 400,000,000 transactions per year with approximately a half billion dollars in credit card transactions per year, Zirmed is one of the largest revenue cycle management technology solutions in the marketplace today.
As a marketplace leader, we wanted to know why Zirmed is the choice for so many providers across the country. Weinstein answered this by noting several key reasons Zirmed is an established leader in the industry. They include:
- Zirmed was the first company to adjudicate a medical billing clearinghouse claim completely online back in 1999.
- We were the first company to run a real-time claims status transaction. (Zirmed conforms to Ansix12 technology protocol.)
- SimpleResponseR takes the hard to understand language of rejections from payors and translates it into simple, plain English and then gives our clients a step-by-step list of instructions on how to correct the claim and get it paid. Zirmed is the only company offering this assistance.
- Zirmed also offers VerifundR which takes paper based payments from insurance companies and turns them into electronic fund transfers. This speeds up the payment process. Another advantage for our customers is that VerifundR will take all paper items, digitally convert them, and then apply the funds correctly for the client. It also creates a file that allows for simple and quick payment posting.
- Zirmed has been ranked #1 by Klas in service for the past 3 years. Klas is a third party company that provides accurate, honest, and impartial ratings of healthcare technology to help providers make informed decisions.
- Our technology is as robust as possible. We are the ones doing the heavy lifting so our clients don’t have to. We hire experts and build the technology in the most innovative way possible.
Outsource Receivables Inc. uses Zirmed technology with many of our client transactions. We were very curious about any new innovations that would make our job easier. Weinstein was able to share two new features that will be released in the coming months.
“We actually have two new features on the horizon at Zirmed. The first is Patient estimation. Before services are rendered at a doctor’s office, patient estimation will allow the provider to know how much a patient’s insurance company typically pays for a given procedure or office visit. This information along with the patient’s deductible amount will now allow the clinic to give an accurate estimate of what the patient’s co-pay will be at the time of the visit. This gives the clinic the opportunity to collect the sometimes difficult to collect self-pay portion of this bill upfront. The second innovation at Zirmed is in our analytics. We are re-vamping the analytics system to give more pro-active reports. We’re adding a benchmarking element. Overall the new analytics will tell our clients more about what is happening with their payments.”
Zirmed is one of the clearinghouses ORI uses on a regular basis. Not all clearinghouses are the same and finding one that provides customer support and training to enable expert use of advanced tools is key to reimbursement and reporting. We enjoyed learning more about Zirmed’s history and look forward to the new features coming out soon; and you can bet that ORI will be learning how to utilize each and every new tool offered.