HBN News

Health Business Navigators and The Verden Group Aim to Assist Medical Practices with Complications of Ever-Changing Payer Policies

Bowling Green, KY-08/08/08 – Health Business Navigators (HBN), a company focused on improving medical practices’ contracts with insurance companies, networks and third party administrators (TPA), has reached agreement with The Verden Group to market a unique Verden Alert process that notifies practices of policy and procedure changes issued by the vast majority of payers and networks nationwide.

Since 1999, Health Business Navigators has worked with practices across the country to achieve improved financial and administrative results in negotiating payer agreements. HBN’s founder and CEO, Penny Noyes, says, “Although much of the negotiation focus should be on better reimbursement rates, it is equally important for practices to negotiate the administrative terms of the agreement. Contract language often references Web based policies and procedures manuals that change during the term of the agreement. The Verden Alerts system provides a fabulous solution to the management of these ever-changing policies.”

Susanne Madden, The Verden Group’s founder and CEO launched the Verden Alerts program in 2007 as a solution for keeping practices abreast of the overwhelming number of policy changes being implemented by the payers and networks. The Verden Group’s service, The Verden Alert, scours over 170 managed care web sites every day to look for changes and updates to medical, administrative and reimbursement policies and procedures. The changes are reviewed by policy specialists, and any important differences are cataloged and organized by insurance company and specialty. These are emailed to Verden subscribers based on their specialties and insurance participation.

“It is not uncommon for a practice to have 10 to 20 insurance or network contracts. Trying to keep track of the payers’ policies related to this number of contracts is a near impossible task for even the best of practice administrators,” Madden indicates. “We are delighted to be endorsed by a firm like Health Business Navigators as their staff is in the trenches every day with practices trying to cope with the daunting task of tracking all the inconsistent rules of the payers.”

Noyes and Madden, with decades of combined experience on the payer side of the industry, concur that the process for payers to communicate changes to providers and the challenge to healthcare providers to track paper notices from payers is difficult for both parties. Verden and HBN will make the communication process even easier for the practices by using Verden’s sorting process, sending only the pertinent changes to practices based on payer and specialty.

The two firms are in the process of developing final terms of the marketing services arrangement which will be launched nationally in Fall 2008. HBN will introduce the Alerts for the first time in Asheville, NC, August 10-13, at the Tri-State conference of the Medical Group Management (MGMA) state chapters of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Jennifer Hager, HBN’s VP of Business Development for the Southeast and former practice administrator says, “As we help our HBN clients to negotiate their new agreements, we can require that payers post policy changes online prior to the effective date of the policy change. The practice can then decide whether to accept the change, dispute it or even terminate based on its significance. We look forward to introducing the Alerts to our clients as a solution that benefits both the practices and the payers.”

HBN will focus initially on rolling out its “HBN Alerts” to its fast-growing list of clients as one of several contract maintenance steps in clients’ aggressive strategies on payer contract compliance. HBN Alerts will join the array of other Health Business Navigators’ tools and services including its revolutionary FeeMaster™, ContractMaster, FeeCreator, ContractReview and Credentialing Management. Verden will still market directly to practices and through other marketing channels.

For more information, contact Penny Noyes or Susanne Madden or visit the respective Web sites at www.HealthBusinessNavigators.com or www.TheVerdenGroup.com.