Questions Physicians
Actually Ask Before Signing.

Somewhere between 5 and 15% of what you've already earned — and the hard part is most of it is invisible. It's never one giant hole. It's underpayments from Medicare Advantage that no one benchmarks against your contracted rate. It's denials that quietly get written off as adjustments instead of appealed. It's 90-day AR that someone stopped chasing because the payer is difficult. None of it shows up as a single line on a report — it just quietly disappears. The audit takes 30 minutes and we'll show you exactly which of these are happening in your practice specifically.

In almost every case, the delay started before the claim was even sent. Eligibility checked the day of the visit instead of the day before. A note that says "patient presents with chest pain" when the payer needs specificity to pay. A modifier that's missing or wrong. Or just — no one called the payer when they went quiet. Any one of those adds weeks to your cycle, and most practices have two or three of them happening at once. We fix all of it at the front end, and most practices notice the difference within the first 30 days.

First thing — we figure out exactly why, because a coding denial and a documentation denial are completely different problems that need completely different fixes. Once we know the cause, we go back to the source, correct it, and appeal with clinical justification that's written specifically for that payer's medical review team — not a generic letter that gets ignored. Then the part most billers skip: we feed it back into the front end so the same thing doesn't come back next month. Over time the protocol gets tighter, and your denial rate drops for that specific reason.

It means 95 out of every 100 claims we submit get paid the first time — no rework, no appeal, no resubmission. The industry average is somewhere around 72%, which sounds okay until you realize every claim in that other 28% either gets delayed by weeks, underpaid, or written off. That number is also what directly controls how fast money actually hits your account. We get there by running every claim through eligibility, documentation review, coding checks, and modifier logic before it ever reaches the clearinghouse — and we show you the rate monthly, no interpretation needed.

That's honestly where the most recoverable money usually is. Most billing teams let it pile up because following up on 90-day AR is slow, payer-specific, and requires documentation that someone has to actually write. We don't treat it as one bucket — we segment by age, payer, and dollar value and work each piece differently. Fresh claims go through standard cycles. The 60-90 day range gets escalated with payer-specific outreach. Anything past 90 gets individually reviewed — some appealed, some need a call to the patient, some get correctly written off. Nothing just quietly disappears.

Every month you get a plain-language report — not a dashboard that requires a billing degree to read. It shows your first-pass rate, denial rate, AR days, collection velocity, and net collection ratio against your own baseline from before we started. If something moves the wrong direction, we tell you why before you think to ask. If it moves the right way, we show you exactly which part of the protocol drove it. We're not interested in a setup where you have to chase someone for basic information about your own revenue.

Most billing companies process claims. We audit them first — and that's where the gap actually is. The majority of revenue loss happens upstream, before a claim is ever sent: documentation that doesn't support the CPT code billed, eligibility that wasn't verified until it was too late, ERA payments that came in short of your contracted rate and no one noticed. If your current biller isn't doing those things, you're losing money and the reports don't show it because the claim technically got processed. The audit will tell you clearly whether that's the case — and it costs you nothing to find out.

Significantly. A biologic infusion claim in rheumatology and a family medicine E&M visit look almost nothing alike when you get into the actual billing. The CPT codes, modifier requirements, prior auth rules, and what specific payers will actually pay — all of it is specialty-specific. A generalist approach gets the paperwork done; a specialty-matched workflow gets the right payment. From day one we map your billing to how your specific specialty is actually coded and paid, not a generic template that's been adjusted slightly for your field.

Yes — we're already fluent across 12+ platforms including Tebra, eClinicalWorks, DrChrono, AdvancedMD, Athenahealth, Availity, Office Ally and more. We come into your system, not the other way around. No software to purchase, no staff retraining, no disruption to how you already work. If you're on something more niche that we haven't touched before, we've brought ourselves up to speed on unfamiliar systems in under a week — we learn your tool, you don't learn ours.

Every denial and every error gets traced back to where it actually started and fed into the front end of the protocol. If a specific CPT code keeps getting denied by a specific payer, we don't just keep resubmitting it and hoping — we find out whether it's a documentation issue, a modifier issue, or a payer rule that changed, and we fix what's happening upstream. That might mean adjusting a documentation template or flagging a payer behavior pattern. Over time, the same mistakes stop appearing, and the first-pass rate climbs because the protocol itself got better — not just because we worked harder.

Both — and it matters more than people assume. Once insurance has processed or denied, whatever the patient owes still needs to go out accurately and promptly. Poorly worded or delayed patient statements lead to confusion, disputes, and payment delays that have nothing to do with the insurance side. We handle both cleanly so there's no gap between the two — the claim gets processed, the patient balance gets billed correctly, and nothing sits in limbo because responsibility crossed from one side to the other.

Before anyone on our team sees a single record, a Business Associate Agreement is signed — no exceptions, no shortcuts. EHR access only happens on approved encrypted workstations, never on a personal device. All file movement uses HIPAA-compliant encrypted platforms. Everything is role-limited and access-logged, and if you ever want to verify any of it, the logs are available on request. This isn't a compliance checklist we run through once — it's just how the operation is built to run, every day.

It actually works the other way around. A lot of practice owners think they have visibility right now — they see what was billed, but not what came back short, what's sitting past 90 days, or what their real net collection ratio actually is. With Proton you get a dedicated contact who knows your practice, monthly reports in plain language, and full visibility into claims, payments, and AR whenever you want it — without having to ask. You're not handing over control. You're finally getting a clear picture of what's actually happening.

A dedicated contact — one person who knows your payer mix, your billing history, and your practice specifically. Not a queue where you explain the same situation to a different person every time you reach out. That's not just a preference — it's how the work actually gets done better. When the person handling your account understands your practice deeply, problems get caught earlier and resolved faster. That kind of continuity doesn't happen in a ticket system.

The first two days are setup — secure EHR access, reviewing your current workflow, and locking in documentation preferences so we're not guessing at your style. Days three through five we run parallel to your existing process: shadow scribing or billing alongside what's already happening, getting feedback, refining until we match your workflow closely. Day six we go live. Notes ready at the end of each visit, claims moving through the protocol. No cold handoff, no gap where things just stop. You know what's happening throughout — it's not a black box from the beginning.

We run a parallel transition — no hard cutover where one team stops and another starts cold. For the first five days we shadow your existing setup and get familiar with your AR. On day six we go live on new claims while simultaneously continuing to work the existing AR under your previous system's workflow. Nothing falls into a gap between two billing teams. We also take a clean AR snapshot at the start and end so you can verify exactly what changed and confirm nothing was left behind in the handoff.

No setup fee, no long-term contract, no hidden charges. The 2-week pilot is $750 — and that's credited in full toward Month 1 if you continue. Ongoing pricing is 5–8% of collections, which means if your collections go down, so does our fee. We didn't build in a flat monthly retainer because we didn't want a fee structure that pays us regardless of how well we do. That alignment matters more to us than contract security.

Because most denials start in the note, not the billing software. When a payer denies for "medical necessity not established," a non-clinical biller sees a remark code. A clinician reads the note and immediately sees what it was missing and how the appeal needs to be written to satisfy that specific payer's medical review team. That's a fundamentally different outcome — not just on the appeal, but on every note that comes after it, because the documentation gap gets fixed at the source. That clinical read is where your first-pass rate actually improves.

Most billing companies are staffed by coders and account managers. They process claims — and when a claim gets denied, they read the remark code and respond to it. We have a physician reviewing the note that generated the denial. Those are fundamentally different capabilities. When a payer denies for "medical necessity not established," a billing team sees a code. Dr. Sherien reads the note and immediately understands whether the documentation supports the diagnosis, what's missing, and how the appeal needs to be written to satisfy that specific payer's medical review criteria. That's not a staffing preference — it's a different category of service.

By day 14 you'll have your first live claims through the protocol, a denial baseline established, and an AR snapshot taken. By day 30 the first-pass rate should be trending up and recurring denial patterns should already be closed at the front end. By day 60 to 90, AR days are measurably reduced, collection velocity has picked up, and we'll put your numbers side by side with what they were before we started — no spin, no cherry-picking. That comparison is how you verify whether this actually worked. We're comfortable with that level of transparency because we're confident in the system.

Both. Credentialing is where most revenue problems actually start — a provider who isn't properly enrolled with a payer gets every claim denied regardless of how clean the coding is, and that can sit unnoticed for months. We handle CAQH profile maintenance, payer enrollment applications, re-credentialing cycles, and NPI/taxonomy updates as part of the same team that's also working your claims — not a separate vendor you have to coordinate between. If a payer flags an enrollment gap, the same person who caught it is the one who fixes your billing around it.

A virtual assistant gets trained on your workflow after they're hired. Our team gets hired because they already understand the workflow — every person working your account has a clinical or coding background before they ever see your account, not after. That distinction matters in practice: a VA flags a denial and forwards it to you; our team reads the denial, knows whether it's a documentation issue or a coding issue, and fixes the root cause before it happens again. We're not cheaper labor doing the same job — we're a different kind of team doing a different job.

Your fee moves with your collections, not against them. We charge a percentage of what we actually collect — if your numbers go up, our fee goes up proportionally; if they dip in a slow month, ours drops too. There's no flat retainer that keeps charging you the same amount regardless of performance. The $750 two-week pilot gets fully credited toward your first month if you continue, so you're never paying for the audit and the engagement separately.