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Physical Therapy Billing | SWAT Team

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SWAT physical therapy billing teamBy Jason Barnes, COO

We are proud to introduce our new physical therapy billing SWAT team!  They are tasked with solving large-scale and complex physical therapy billing problems that fall beyond the expertise of your account manager and billing team. This new addition to our team packs over 50 years of physical therapy billing, practice management, and Vericle experience. It is managed by Kathleen Casbarro and it includes Wendy Thorington and Rebecca Harwood.  

The SWAT team works with your account managers, the physical therapy billing follow up team, and technology team focusing on large-scale problems. Your account manager, PMC, SPOC or Coach uses their judgment when deciding to activate the physical therapy Billing SWAT team for your account. But you should know that your SWAT TEAM is constantly looking for ways to improve the reimbursements you receive.

Their expertise includes:

  • Vericle® system knowledge
  • Trouble-shooting complex physical therapy billing issues
  • Rate validations
  • Practice management coaching

The Network Effect,  an example of a case recently resolved by our new physical therapy Billing SWAT team is shown below. This Practice joined the bestPT Team in July and was fully trained in the system between September and October.  In Late December the bestPT Team and the practice agreed that there was a serious concern with one of the payers for the provider.The bestPT team activated the SWAT Team. One month later the issue has been resolved which resulted in almost doubled the billable income!  In another 30 days the SWAT Team was so effective that they had increased the billable income by an additional 300 percent!

Your SWAT Team

Kathleen, brings 28 years experience in Practice Management with specialty background in Cardiology, Orthopedics, Mental Health, Nephrology and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) coding and billing. Kathy has held a coding certification from the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) for 11 years,  and brings 6 years – in Vericle, including major accounts across both ambulatory practices and hospital facilities.  Kathy has owned and operated two successful turnkey DME businesses and shares her knowledge and business sense with the clients in Vericle.  Kathy has been instrumental in our needs assessment to building a UB-04 billing platform. In the next 3 months she will be performing a needs assessment for implementation to ICD-10.

Wendy brings 5 years experience of Vericle, Coding certification, and 21 years experience in Practice Management with a specialty background in Chiropractic, Cardiology, Physical Therapy, Pediatrics, Optical, and Home Health.  Wendy excels in identifying billing patterns, processing errors and/or system issues that inhabit the final adjudication of claims. Wendy continues to implement new billing validations as payers dictate their billing policies.  Wendy is currently doing a portion of quality assurance on claims processed by the billing follow up team on a daily basis.  

Rebecca has 2 years Vericle experience coupled with 2 years experience as a Project Manager, focusing on implementing a new documentation platform used by our Physical Therapists with attention to the most current tests and treatments. Rebecca is also managing our latest implementation of XDocs, which is a customized documentation program that stores and tracks arbitrary forms. Rebecca is currently working with practices to customize templates based on the documents they provide. The XDocs can be shared among practices and Rebecca is working on developing templates that will be made available to all practices. Rebecca has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.