“We were fortunate enough to work with HBN when FeeMaster was being developed. We’ve been using the payer analyzer tool for several years now to determine whether payer offer rates are appropriate… and when they are not, we use FeeMaster to develop counteroffers that are acceptable. With the ever- growing uninsured population we also use FeeMaster’s chargemaster tool to create the baseline for consistent prompt payment discounts. FeeMaster has been invaluable in developing and achieving our group’s financial goals. Can’t say enough about the staff at HBN and the insight they provide us in the contracting process.”
Jerome I. Silver, M.D.
Partner, Roswell Radiology Associates
Get a new perspective on your payor agreements and chargemaster!
FeeMaster™ is an easy-to-use tool to assist you in both renegotiating your payor and managed care organization (MCO) agreements and updating your chargemaster.
Using your data, your market, your specialty, your FeeMaster is tailored to your specific practice. It provides you with information that payors would rather not have you know in your negotiating process. So affordable, your return on investment (ROI) will amaze you and you will wonder how you managed without it.
Even if you think your payor agreements and chargemaster are under control, this tool can empower you to add 10-30% more to your bottom line.
Ask yourself these questions to determine if the FeeMaster can assist you.
Are you overwhelmed by the revenue erosion that your managed care agreements have caused for your practice?
Do you really know what your current contracts are doing to your bottom line? Or to income for specific procedures?
When a payor sends a contract with a reimbursement schedule based on a percentage of a given year of Medicare RBRVS or other proprietary fee schedule, do you know how many dollars will be lost or gained by your practice over the next contract term as a result of the proposed schedule?
Wondering whether your chargemaster is in line with the market and/or what payors use to determine UCR for maximum allowable payments?
Don’t be intimidated by what’s in your black box; let us import your data into a tool that empowers you to tackle your next negotiation and test your chargemaster for adequacy of charges.
This affordable tool gives you just what you need for both, plain and simple.
Payer Contracting Tools Ranks #2 out of 40 Categories in Recent MGMA AdminiServe Member Needs Survey
MGMA asked which vendor categories should be represented in MGMA’s AdminiServe partnerships in its 2006 member survey. Out of 40 categories from which to select, “Tools for Analyzing Payor Contracts” ranked number 2, second to only coding reference tools.
Years before this study, Health Business Navigators created FeeMaster to address this very important practice issue. HBN puts at your fingertips a tool, tailored to your practice, that calculates instantaneously the potential financial effects of nearly any contract fee schedule offer. Included in this material is a little background on HBN, client results, sample reports and pricing to help you decide if FeeMaster would help your practice.
Health Business Navigators’ founder, Penny Noyes, spent 18 years on the payer side of the industry, responsible for thousands of provider contracts nationwide. During the mid-to-late 1990’s she switched to the provider side and spent 5 years in practice management, handling the acquisitions, revenue improvement, and managed care contracting for nearly 100 health centers in 7 states. In 1999, she founded HBN with the goal of providing consulting services to physicians to create an even playing field at the negotiating table between payer and provider. Today HBN’s expert staff works with clients across the country to improve contracts with payers. The design of FeeMaster is regularly updated for ease of use and to address the ever-changing needs and methodologies in the contract negotiation processes. Special FeeMaster models address the unique reimbursement methodologies for ASCs, radiology, and other services.
When you order FeeMaster
You decide which payer and network contracts you want to analyze. HBN staff works with you to pull well-defined data from your practice management system for each contract you want to analyze or renegotiate.
HBN loads your data into your FeeMaster tool, which is pre-populated with formulas and publicly available data, enabling your tool to test an infinite number of payer offers and your counter-offers to determine what various reimbursement rates will do to your bottom line, in aggregate and by CPT®.
An HBN contracting specialist sends you your FeeMaster tool and walks you through using it in a demo lasting up to one hour. They show you the glaring issues the tool can expose about your contracts and chargemaster and answer any questions you might have.
CPT is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association
Here is what you get with your FeeMaster
Some Actual Results:
One six-physician group used FeeMaster to evaluate all of its payors and was able to narrow down the four payors impacting their practice the most, with detailed information on each broken down by cpt and general categories of surgical, E&M and other codes. This practice went to these four payors several months before contract renewals with proposed new fee schedules based on projected impact of the proposals for the coming contract year. With the power of this information, two were renegotiated and two were terminated when the payors failed to increase their schedules to acceptable levels. A year later, the verifiable impact was $380,000 more to the bottom line from just these four payors.
A solo practitioner in a very competitive market and specialty was offered a contract renewal by a large national payor based on 105% of 2002 Medicare RBRVS in lieu of their current contractual rate of approximately 85% of 1999 Medicare RBRVS. Using the FeeMaster this practice determined the actual impact of the newly offered schedule was only an insulting .65% higher, yes less than 1%, for the coming term. Given this was already a low rate and armed with the data to prove his point, this physician negotiated a higher new schedule.
A specialty physician was asked to sign a new agreement based on a proprietary fee schedule by a managed care organization used by a large employer’s third party administrator in a metropolitan market. She ran her old data and the proposed rates through the FeeMaster and determined the new schedule was actually 35% below the old rates, which were already quite low. This information empowered this physician to tell the MCO to accept a more appropriate schedule or terminate upon the anniversary. Termination initially occurred, but with patience and patient loyalty the physician was offered the rates she needed within months. In running her data through the FeeMaster the physician also determined that her charges for approximately 20 of her most commonly billed codes were too low and increased them to market rates.
More Information
For more information, a demo, pricing, or to make arrangements for your customized tool to be developed, contact us by
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