From denial management to credentialing, prior authorization to RCM software — clear, expert answers to the questions practices ask most.
Denial Management
Eligibility
Prior Auth
Credentialing
Radiology Billing
Billing Companies
Revenue Cycle Management & Medical Billing Basic
Medical billing is the process of submitting claims to insurance payers and collecting payment for healthcare services. It covers tasks like coding diagnoses and procedures, submitting claims, and following up on unpaid balances.
Revenue cycle management (RCM) is the broader, end-to-end financial process that starts before a patient even walks in the door — encompassing scheduling, insurance eligibility verification, prior authorization, claim submission, denial management, patient collections, and financial reporting. Medical billing is a critical component within RCM, but RCM also includes front-end denial prevention, analytics, and compliance oversight.
In short: billing is a subset of RCM. MedCods manages your entire revenue cycle, not just claims submission.
A clean claim is one that is submitted correctly the first time — with accurate patient demographics, valid insurance information, correct procedure (CPT) and diagnosis (ICD-10) codes, appropriate modifiers, and no missing required fields. It passes all payer edits without triggering a rejection or request for additional information.
Clean claim rate matters enormously because rejected or corrected claims delay payment and cost staff time to rework. The industry average clean claim rate hovers around 85%, meaning roughly 1 in 7 claims needs rework before payment. MedCods achieves a 98.5% clean claim rate through AI-powered pre-submission scrubbing, reducing your administrative burden and accelerating cash flow.
CPT codes (Current Procedural Terminology) are five-digit codes that describe the procedures and services a provider performs — such as an office visit, surgery, or imaging study. They are maintained by the AMA.
ICD-10 codes (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision) describe the patient’s diagnosis or condition. Every CPT code submitted must be supported by a medically appropriate ICD-10 code, or the claim will be denied for medical necessity.
HCPCS codes (Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System) cover services, supplies, drugs, and equipment not captured by CPT — like durable medical equipment, ambulance services, and injectable medications. Level I HCPCS = CPT codes; Level II are the alphanumeric codes like J0130.
Errors in any of these — wrong code, outdated code, mismatched diagnosis-to-procedure pairing, or missing modifiers — are leading causes of claim denials. MedCods’ MAXIMUS AI engine catches coding errors before submission.
A/R days (Accounts Receivable days, or Days in A/R) measures how long it takes on average to collect payment after a service is rendered. It is calculated by dividing total outstanding A/R by average daily charges.
The industry average is approximately 42 A/R days. A well-performing practice should aim for fewer than 30 days. MedCods clients average fewer than 20 A/R days — more than 50% faster than the industry norm — due to faster claim submission, proactive denial management, and automated patient balance follow-up.
High A/R days signal cash flow problems, billing inefficiencies, or denial backlogs that are silently eroding your practice’s revenue.
MAXIMUS is MedCods’ proprietary AI coding and pre-submission audit engine. It reviews every claim before it leaves your system, performing hundreds of automated checks including:
MAXIMUS currently catches 87% of potential denials before submission, converting claims that would have been denied into clean claims that pay on the first pass. The engine continuously learns from denial patterns across MedCods’ client base, improving its accuracy over time without any manual input from your staff.
MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) is CMS’s value-based payment program for eligible clinicians. Providers submit data across four performance categories — Quality, Promoting Interoperability, Improvement Activities, and Cost — which determine upward or downward adjustments to their Medicare reimbursement (up to ±9% in recent years).
Yes, MedCods supports MIPS reporting. We track your performance throughout the year, identify your optimal measure selections, and submit your data to CMS to maximize your composite score and avoid negative payment adjustments. Our team monitors regulatory updates to ensure your reporting stays compliant as CMS modifies program requirements annually.
Most practices are fully operational with MedCods within 2–4 weeks. The onboarding process includes:
Complex multi-provider or multi-specialty groups may take slightly longer. We assign a dedicated onboarding specialist to your account to ensure a smooth transition with zero claim submission gaps
MedCods integrates with all major EHR and practice management systems including Epic, athenahealth, Kareo, eClinicalWorks, DrChrono, Modernizing Medicine, NextGen, Allscripts, AdvancedMD, and many others via HL7 and FHIR-based APIs. We also support direct integration through clearinghouse connections.
If your EHR is not on the standard list, our integrations team can build a custom connection. We do not require you to switch EHR systems to work with MedCods.
Claim Denials, Appeals & Denial Management Software
Denial management is the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, appealing, and preventing claim denials from insurance payers. Effective denial management has two equally important components:
Without a structured denial management process, practices typically write off 5–15% of revenue that was rightfully owed. MedCods’ denial management team, combined with MAXIMUS AI, handles both sides — appeals and root-cause prevention.
These terms are often confused but have important distinctions:
Rejection occurs before the claim is processed. The payer or clearinghouse returns the claim because it failed technical edits — missing required fields, invalid member ID, invalid NPI, etc. Rejections are not adjudicated; they simply bounce back and must be corrected and resubmitted.
Denial occurs after the claim is processed. The payer adjudicates it and decides not to pay — for reasons like lack of medical necessity, no prior authorization, patient ineligibility on the date of service, or bundling rules. Denials require a formal appeal process and are tracked differently in the revenue cycle.
Both require action, but denials carry appeal rights and deadlines that vary by payer.
The industry average denial rate is approximately 11.8% of claims submitted. For many independent practices without robust billing support, it can exceed 15–20%. MedCods clients average a 1.5% denial rate — roughly 87% lower than the national average.
We achieve this through a layered strategy:
The most frequently encountered denial codes and how MedCods addresses them:
When a claim is denied, MedCods follows a structured appeals workflow:
Payers have strict appeal deadlines (typically 90–180 days from the denial date). Missing those windows means the revenue is forfeited — which is why prompt action is critical.
Denial heatmaps are visual analytics dashboards in the MedCods platform that map denial patterns across dimensions like payer, provider, CPT code, facility, and denial reason code. They make it immediately visible where denials are concentrating — for example, if 40% of your denials are CO-11 (medical necessity) from a single payer for a specific procedure code.
Rather than treating each denial as an isolated incident, heatmaps reveal the systemic root cause. Once identified, MedCods works with your clinical team to adjust documentation templates, payer-specific coding practices, or prior authorization workflows — so the denial stops recurring rather than being individually appealed indefinitely.
Most practices see measurable improvement within the first 30–60 days. The MAXIMUS AI engine begins pre-submission auditing immediately upon go-live, which reduces new denials from day one. Historic denial backlogs from your previous system are worked through by our appeals team simultaneously.
Within 90 days, the majority of clients reach a denial rate below 3%. Full optimization to our benchmark of 1.5% typically occurs within 3–6 months as MAXIMUS learns your specific payer mix and the heatmap-driven workflow improvements take hold upstream.
An ERA (Electronic Remittance Advice), also called an 835 transaction file, is the electronic document payers send to explain how they adjudicated each claim — what they paid, what they denied, and the reason codes for each action. It is the electronic equivalent of a paper EOB (Explanation of Benefits).
MedCods ingests ERA/835 files automatically as they arrive from payers and clearinghouses. Our system parses the reason codes, maps them to our denial taxonomy, and routes each denied claim into the appropriate appeals workflow — without manual staff intervention for classification. This ensures no denial falls through the cracks and all appeal deadlines are tracked automatically.
Insurance Eligibility Verification & Prior Authorization
Insurance eligibility verification is the process of confirming — before a service is provided — that a patient’s insurance is active, that your practice is in-network with their plan, and what the patient’s specific benefits are (deductible, copay, coinsurance, coverage limits). It also checks whether a referral or prior authorization is required.
It matters because eligibility-related denials are among the most preventable in billing. If a patient’s coverage has lapsed, their plan changed, or they’re seeing an out-of-network provider without knowing it, the claim will deny and the practice must either pursue the patient directly or write off the balance. Systematic eligibility checks before every visit eliminate this category of denial entirely.
Best practice is to check eligibility at both points — and ideally again 24–48 hours before the appointment.
MedCods automates all three checkpoints via real-time 270/271 eligibility transactions, alerting your front desk to coverage issues before the patient is seen rather than after the claim is denied.
Prior authorization (PA) is a requirement by insurance payers that certain services, procedures, or medications be approved before they are provided. The payer reviews clinical information to determine if the service is medically necessary before agreeing to cover it.
Services commonly requiring prior authorization include:
Requirements vary significantly by payer and plan. Providing a service without an obtained PA results in a CO-197 denial, which is one of the most expensive types of denial to resolve — and sometimes unappealable.
Traditional prior authorization relies on fax, phone calls, or payer web portals — a manual, time-consuming process where staff often wait days for a response, and authorization numbers must be manually entered into billing systems.
FHIR-based prior authorization uses the HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard to exchange PA requests and responses electronically, in real time, between provider systems and payer systems. Instead of faxing clinical notes and waiting for a callback, FHIR-PA sends a structured electronic request that payers can process and respond to automatically — sometimes in minutes.
MedCods supports FHIR-based PA workflows where payers have implemented the standard, dramatically reducing PA turnaround times and eliminating manual tracking.
CMS-0057-F is a final rule issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that requires payers — including Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid managed care plans, and CHIP plans — to implement FHIR-based APIs for prior authorization and patient data sharing. Key provisions that took effect January 1, 2026 include:
For practices, this means faster PA decisions and more transparency. MedCods is fully aligned with CMS-0057-F requirements and supports electronic PA submission to compliant payers.
270 and 271 are HIPAA-mandated electronic data interchange (EDI) transaction sets used for insurance eligibility verification.
MedCods automates 270/271 transactions for every patient on your schedule, returning structured eligibility data that populates directly into your workflow — no manual data entry, no portal logins, no phone calls to insurance companies.
CO-197 denials occur when a service is provided without the required prior authorization on file. MedCods prevents them through a multi-layer authorization management workflow:
This proactive approach has virtually eliminated CO-197 denials for MedCods clients with high PA-volume specialties like radiology, orthopedics, and oncology.
Medical Credentialing & Payer Enrollment Services
Medical credentialing is the process by which insurance payers verify a provider’s qualifications — including their education, training, licensure, board certifications, malpractice history, and work history — before agreeing to reimburse them for services provided to their members.
Until a provider is credentialed and enrolled with a payer, claims submitted under that provider’s NPI to that payer will be denied outright. Credentialing is not optional — it is the gatekeeping process that determines whether a payer will pay your claims at all. New providers, providers joining new practices, and practices adding new payer contracts all require credentialing before billing can begin.
CAQH (Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare) ProView is a centralized database where providers submit and maintain their credentialing information — licenses, certifications, malpractice coverage, education, etc. Most commercial payers and many government payers pull provider data directly from CAQH during the credentialing process, rather than requiring providers to submit the same information repeatedly to each payer individually.
Keeping your CAQH profile complete, accurate, and attested (re-authorized every 120 days) is critical. An outdated or incomplete CAQH profile is one of the most common reasons credentialing applications are delayed. MedCods manages CAQH profile maintenance as part of our credentialing service, so your profile is always current and ready for any new payer enrollment.
PECOS (Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System) is the CMS online enrollment system for Medicare. Providers and organizations must enroll in PECOS to bill Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. PECOS enrollment establishes your Medicare billing privileges, associates your NPI with your practice location, and designates your payment routing.
Commercial payer credentialing (Blue Cross, Aetna, United, etc.) is a separate process managed by each private insurer. While CAQH provides a common data source, each commercial payer has its own application, timeline, and review process — and being enrolled in Medicare does not automatically enroll you with any commercial plan. MedCods manages both PECOS and commercial credentialing, tracking each application independently through to approval.
Commercial payer credentialing typically takes 60–120 days industry-wide, depending on the payer. Medicare enrollment via PECOS typically runs 30–60 days but can extend further during high-volume periods or if supplemental documentation is requested.
MedCods accelerates this timeline through proactive application management — submitting complete applications the first time, following up with payer credentialing departments on a structured schedule, and maintaining pre-populated application templates for each major payer. Most of our clients complete the credentialing process 30–40% faster than the industry average because we eliminate delays caused by missing documentation and missed follow-up.
Re-credentialing is the periodic renewal of a provider’s credentials with each payer — typically every 2–3 years. Payers use re-credentialing to confirm that the provider’s licenses are still active, malpractice coverage is current, and no new adverse actions have occurred.
If a practice misses a re-credentialing deadline, the payer can terminate the provider’s participation, which means claims submitted after the termination date will be denied — and the provider may need to go through a full re-enrollment process to be reinstated. Retroactive credentialing is rarely granted, so missed windows can result in permanent revenue loss for services provided during the lapse period.
MedCods tracks all re-credentialing expiration dates and initiates the renewal process 90–120 days in advance, ensuring no lapses occur.
In some cases, yes. When services were provided during a credentialing lapse, recovery options depend on the payer, the nature of the lapse, and how quickly the issue is identified. MedCods will:
While full recovery is not always possible, proactive engagement often recovers a meaningful portion of lost revenue. More importantly, MedCods’ ongoing credentialing monitoring prevents these lapses from occurring in the first place.
Telehealth practices face a uniquely complex credentialing challenge: the provider must typically be licensed in the state where the patient is located at the time of service, and credentialed with payers in each of those states. For practices serving patients across multiple states, this can mean dozens of simultaneous licensure and payer enrollment processes.
MedCods manages multi-state credentialing through a centralized tracking system that maps each provider’s active licenses, pending applications, and payer enrollment status by state. We use interstate compacts (like the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact for physicians) where available to streamline licensure, and manage each state’s commercial payer applications in parallel. Practices receive a real-time dashboard showing exactly where they can bill and where enrollment is still pending.
Yes, behavioral health credentialing has several unique characteristics:
MedCods has dedicated credentialing specialists experienced in behavioral health payer enrollment who understand these nuances and manage the process accordingly.
Radiology Billing Software & Imaging RCM
Radiology billing is among the most technically complex specialties in medical billing for several reasons:
Billing errors in radiology are expensive — a single missed modifier or incorrect TC/26 split can result in denial of high-value imaging claims.
Many radiology CPT codes represent both a technical component (TC) — the equipment, supplies, and technologist performing the study — and a professional component (26) — the radiologist’s interpretation and report.
Incorrect TC/26 application leads to duplicate billing denials or underpayment. MedCods applies the correct modifier configuration based on the rendering site-of-service and the contractual relationship between the practice and the facility — automatically, for every claim.
Radiology Benefit Managers (RBMs) like Evolent Health, AIM Specialty Health, and National Imaging Associates manage prior authorization for advanced imaging on behalf of payers. Each RBM has its own clinical criteria, portal, and turnaround standards.
MedCods manages RBM authorizations through a dedicated radiology PA workflow:
This prevents the most common — and most expensive — radiology denial type: services rendered without the proper RBM authorization on file.
MedCods supports the full range of radiology CPT codes, including:
78000–78999:
Our coding team includes credentialed radiology billing specialists (CIRCC-certified for interventional radiology) who understand the specific documentation requirements, modifier usage, and payer policies for each imaging modality and procedure type.
Teleradiology groups — where radiologists interpret studies remotely for hospitals and imaging centers across multiple states — face the same multi-state credentialing and billing complexity as other telehealth specialties, but at higher volume.
MedCods supports teleradiology groups with:
Interventional radiology (IR) involves minimally invasive, image-guided procedures — such as angiography, embolization, stent placement, tumor ablation, and drain placement. IR billing is particularly complex because:
MedCods employs CIRCC-certified coders for interventional radiology clients to ensure accurate coding and maximum compliant reimbursement.
Medical Billing Software for Billing Companies & CBOs
Standard billing software is designed for individual practices managing their own billing. MedCods Enterprise is purpose-built for billing companies and centralized billing offices (CBOs) that manage billing on behalf of multiple provider clients simultaneously. Key differences:
White-label medical billing software is a platform that a billing company licenses from a technology vendor (like MedCods) but presents to their own clients under the billing company’s brand — with the billing company’s logo, color scheme, and domain name. Clients see the billing company’s branded portal; MedCods operates invisibly in the background.
This allows billing companies to offer their clients a sophisticated technology experience — real-time claim tracking, denial dashboards, payment posting visibility, and analytics — without the capital cost of building proprietary software. The billing company retains full control of the client relationship and brand identity, while MedCods provides the underlying engine and infrastructure.
MedCods’ white-label tier includes custom domain hosting, branded email notifications, and configurable client-facing dashboards that can be restricted or expanded based on what each billing company wants their clients to see.
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