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The Story of Meier & Marsh Professional Therapies
Wade Meier and Troy Marsh have spent the past two decades caring for communities across Utah at their four physical therapy practices. At Meier & Marsh Professional Therapies, their personal approach and specialty expertise have helped patients of all ages get the care they deserve and get back to doing what they love.
Despite their success in running multiple practice locations and treating thousands of patients, billing was something that always seemed to fail in meeting their expectations. Transparency around claims felt elusive, their billing partner wasn’t easy or quick to reach, and their approach to billing seemed relatively archaic. They knew there was a better way.
After several months searching for the right billing partner and evaluating vendors, they decided to move forward with Athelas RCM due to its data-rich dashboard, superior customer support response times, and ability to build customized solutions and workflows.
16% Increase Payout Per Claim
Meier & Marsh was able to reach a 16% increase in revenue on average per claim through a variety of incremental changes with Athelas. With its customized rules engine — a patented engine that analyzes every claim and optimizes claim submissions payload to maximize reimbursement — Athelas helped to drive a meaningful improvement in first pass approval, contributing to an increase in revenue per claim. Coding optimization efforts also highlighted significant opportunities for the team to improve how they are billed.
Denials Improved by 70%
When Athelas took over for billing, denials remained in high single digits, close to the industry standard of 11%. Over time, the intelligent Athelas denial management tool — which trains itself on the unique nuances of each customer — applied its constantly evolving insights to their specific practices and patients, leading to a significant improvement in denial rate. Within the first month, denials were below 5%, and within 6 months, down to 3% — a 70% overall improvement in denials.
From Unresponsive to Always On Call
One of the biggest challenges for Meier & Marsh was getting in touch with their former biller. The service was inconsistent and follow-up time ranged unsustainably from days to weeks. With Athelas, they received a high-touch onboarding process, partnered with a dedicated operations manager, and benefited from an average response time of 4 hours or less with an average maximum resolution time of 12 hours.
Overall Results
Partnering with Athelas has given Meier & Marsh an enhanced level of data transparency, allowing them to significantly increase their revenue, imbue in their office staff a greater sense in confidence and response time, and improve denials to lessen the burden of big bills on patients.
“Athelas has helped us in making one of our core values a reality: Efficiency. The term ‘efficiency’ can be defined as the ability to achieve an end goal with little-to-no waste, effort, or energy. Being efficient means you can achieve your results by putting the resources you have in the best way possible. Put simply, something is efficient if nothing is wasted and all processes are optimized.”
Learn More
For healthcare practices and hospitals seeking a transformative partner in revenue cycle management, Athelas stands as a proven solution. The success story of Meier & Marsh underscores the positive impact of strategic collaboration and AI-powered RCM workflows. Reach out to Athelas today to explore how your organization can achieve similar success in revolutionizing its revenue cycle management.
