Catch the coding error before the claim goes out.
It is the quietest way to lose money in healthcare. Coding errors, denied claims, and slow reimbursements tie up working capital and bury the back office in rework, and none of it shows up as a line item. Here is how one provider closed the leak, and what twelve months of it was worth.
saved a year, from avoided penalties and rework
to cash, reimbursement in 15 to 20 days
a month back to patient care
Story highlights
- Denials stopped at the source. Every claim was checked for the coding and eligibility errors that trigger denials, and corrected before it was ever sent.
- Cash in 15 to 20 days. Clean claims went straight to the payer with no manual queue, and $2.5M a year in penalties and rework stopped leaking out.
- 500+ hours a month back to care. People handled only the exceptions, and the time once spent re-keying and chasing went back to patients.
The situation
A specialty practice, and billing that could not keep pace.
The provider was a regional specialty care group focused on pain and spine management. Billing was largely manual: data keyed by hand, inconsistent codes, and denials reworked one at a time against payer rules that kept shifting. Leadership set out to automate the checks, cut the errors, and improve revenue-cycle performance.
The problem
Revenue-cycle leakage is the silent margin killer.
Billing was where the provider’s earned revenue quietly went missing, and it never showed up as a line item. It showed up as margin, quietly leaving. Three things drove it.
Denials drained the margin
Every denied claim was revenue earned, then stuck in rework before it could be collected.
Slow claims tied up cash
Money the practice had already earned sat waiting weeks to arrive.
The back office could not keep up
More volume meant more manual checking, more cost, and more slipping through.
What OnStak did
Every claim, checked before it left the building.
OnStak rebuilt the front of the revenue cycle. Every claim was checked for the errors that cause denials before it was ever sent. The clean ones went straight to the payer. Only the exceptions reached a person. And the system kept learning from what the payers sent back.
Errors caught before they became denials
Each claim was checked for the coding and eligibility errors that trigger denials, and corrected before it was submitted.
Cash arrived faster
Clean claims went straight to the payer with no manual queue, cutting reimbursement to 15 to 20 days.
The back office got its time back
People handled only the exceptions, not every claim, which freed more than 500 hours a month.
It got smarter over time
It learned which claims got denied and why, and flagged payers who paid slowly or short, so contracts could be renegotiated from evidence.
What changed
From finding the problem after the denial to preventing it before the claim.
Claims went out and hoped.
- Denials came back weeks later, one at a time.
- The team spent its days re-keying and chasing.
- Cash the practice had already earned sat waiting.
Now nothing leaves unchecked.
- Every claim is checked before it is ever sent .
- Clean claims pay in 15 to 20 days .
- 500+ hours a month went back to patient care.
The outcome
Twelve months · anonymized providerTwelve months later, the margin stopped leaving.
The idea that holds it together
The cheapest denial is the one that never happens.
“We start with your problem, and shape the solution around it.”
Awais Janjua / Chief Technology Officer, OnStak