Your biller is retiring.
Decades of payer knowledge are about to walk out the door, and you've seen what the hiring market looks like. The replacements are clinic generalists, and the surgical ones are already employed.
Revenue cycle management for ambulatory surgery centers
Your surgery center's revenue cycle.Run by specialists, inside your systems.
EMB is the specialized billing department for Ambulatory Surgery Centers and Clinics. A dedicated team manages your entire revenue cycle inside your EHR and clearinghouse.
Surgery center and clinic specialists. 98% first-pass clean claim rate, and we'll show you exactly how we count it.
Why centers switch
It's usually one of four moments.
Another billing company is failing you.
Reports arrive weeks late. Denials sit. You ask where a claim stands and wait days for a vague answer about your own money.
You're doing it all yourself.
You run the center, and somewhere along the way the billing became yours too. Volume grew, the back office didn't, and one person holding it together is one sick week away from a revenue event.
Your growth outpaced your back office.
New locations, more surgeons, a heavier case mix, and the same billing team doing the same things they did two years ago. The reports look busy, but they don't tell you where the money is stuck.
Four different doors into the same room: revenue you're accountable for and can't fully see. That's the problem EMB was built to end.
Revenue leakage
Your surgery center is losing money because your revenue cycle is quietly underperforming.
Money rarely disappears all at once. It disappears a little at a time.
In each of those situations, the leak works the same way. Revenue gets managed where nobody at the center can watch it: claims in someone else's queue, write-offs decided elsewhere, reports that summarize instead of show. A claim that ages past a filing deadline never announces itself. It just quietly stops being revenue, while every report still reads fine.
Quietly written off since you opened this page: $0
The EMB approach
It's not what gets done. It's where the work happens.
How ASC billing usually runs
How it runs for our clients
Your claims are worked in the billing company's system. You get a summary when they choose to send one.
Everything happens in your EMR and practice management system. You can open any claim, any day, without asking.
One good biller carries the whole function, and everyone hopes she doesn't take vacation.
A named team with direct lines, cross-trained on your payers, with depth behind the primary contact.
A percentage fee for what turns out to be mostly claim submission. Rejections come back to your front desk.
Denials, appeals, and payer follow-up are our work, not yours. Your staff stops absorbing the overflow.
Write-offs happen inside a workflow you never see, and show up later as a number you can't unwind.
No dollar is written off without your sign-off. Every adjustment has a name and a reason attached.
Specialty rules get treated as edge cases. Filing deadlines pass in a queue nobody is watching.
ASC-specific coding, implant and multiple-procedure rules, and deadline tracking handled by people who do this daily.
Leaving means losing your history, because the data lives in their platform.
Thirty days notice, and your data never leaves your systems. Your history stays yours.
Same effort on both sides. Different place for the work, and a different level of accountability for the people who answer for the numbers. Surgical clinics and other complex healthcare organizations run the same way here: Specialties and Services.
Our commitments
Four commitments, and you can hold us to every one of them.
01
Your systems.
All work happens inside your own EMR, clearinghouse, and practice management system, visible always.
02
Your people.
Your team is named. You know who they are, and you can reach them directly.
03
Your sign-off.
No dollar written off without your approval.
04
Your exit.
Thirty days notice, your data stays in your systems, leaving never costs you your history.
Architecture is a claim. Numbers are proof.
Client results
Four practices, two surgery centers, real numbers, nothing rounded up.
And the numbers only matter if the transition period itself doesn't hurt. So here's exactly how it goes.
The transition period
The transition period takes four steps, and it's all effortless and straightforward.
Step 01
The first seven days
Access to your systems, a full read of your aging, payer mix, and denial patterns, and a named team introduced by name and direct line.
Step 02
The parallel period
New claims move to us while the existing work finishes cleanly. Nothing hinges on a single cutover date.
Step 03
The ninety-day honesty
A straight read on what we found, what we fixed, and what is still open, including the parts that aren't flattering to us.
Step 04
The hybrid model
Keep your existing biller. We work alongside them, take the depth work, and cover the gaps. Plenty of our clients never let anyone go.
It works this way because of who built it.
Executive team
We built the billing provider we couldn't find.
Dr. Tarek Shahbandar
President
Dr. Tarek Shahbandar is a double board-certified physician who owned and operated his own practices for more than twenty years. He built EMB after cycling through billing company after billing company for his own practice, and finding none that worked the way an owner needs: transparent, accountable, and visible. Today EMB runs on the model he wished had existed, with a 98% first-pass clean claim rate.
Jacqueline Bork
Managing Director
Jacqueline Bork co-founded EMB and leads its operations. She began her career running the complete front and back office of a single-physician practice, every schedule, every claim, every payer call, and built EMB's delivery model from that ground up. The named teams, the in-your-systems workflow, and the client sign-off on every write-off are her architecture.
Next step
Wondering how much slips through your revenue cycle every month? Book the call and find out.
And if you can't get a straight answer from your current billing company, that's a good reason to start here too. A discovery call is a working conversation about your numbers, not a pitch. If you'd rather read first, the Knowledge Center is yours with nothing attached.
Medical billing FAQ
Common questions about medical billing.
The questions administrators and owners ask us most, answered plainly.
What is medical billing for an ambulatory surgery center?
Medical billing for a surgery center covers everything between the case being performed and the money landing in the account: coding the procedure, submitting a clean claim, working the payer response, appealing denials, posting payments, and following the balance to zero. ASC medical billing differs from clinic billing because of implant and supply reimbursement, multiple-procedure reductions, and facility-versus-professional splits.
How is EMB different from a typical medical billing company?
All of the work happens inside your own EMR, clearinghouse, and practice management system, so you can watch every claim in real time. You get a specialized billing team that operates as an extension of yours, reachable directly by your front office, rather than a ticket queue you cannot see into.
What does outsourced medical billing cost?
EMB is paid as a percentage of collections, so we only get paid when you do. The rate depends on specialty mix, volume, and the scope of the revenue cycle we take on. We quote it after a discovery call, in writing, with no setup fee.
Which specialties do you handle besides surgery centers?
Pain management, ophthalmology, family medicine, chiropractic, physiotherapy, allergy and immunology, neuropsychology, and mental and behavioral health, alongside multi-specialty surgical facilities and clinics.
How long does it take to switch medical billing companies?
The transition period runs in four steps and typically takes a few weeks. Your existing claims keep moving the entire time; there is no cutover day where billing stops.
Do you work inside our existing EMR and clearinghouse?
Yes. We do not move you onto our software. Every claim, note, and payment stays in the systems you already own, so your reporting, audit trail, and access never depend on us handing anything back.
Who on your team will our front office actually talk to?
A named team, introduced by name and direct line during the first week. Your schedulers and front desk contact them directly about prior auth, patient balances, and claim status rather than filing a ticket into a queue.
How do you handle denials and appeals?
Denials are worked daily, not batched at month end. Each one is coded to a root cause, appealed with the documentation the payer requires, and fed back into the front-end process so the same denial does not repeat next month.
What happens to our aged A/R when we move to EMB?
We read your full aging in the first seven days, separate what is still collectible from what is not, and work the collectible balances alongside new claims. Nothing gets written off without your sign-off.
Do you handle medical coding as well as billing?
Yes. Certified coders review procedure and diagnosis coding, implant and supply capture, modifiers, and multiple-procedure reductions before the claim goes out, which is where most of the clean-claim rate is won.
How is your medical billing performance reported?
You see live numbers in your own system at all times, plus a regular read on clean-claim rate, days in A/R, denial categories, and collections per case, including the parts that are not flattering to us.
Is your medical billing service HIPAA compliant?
Yes. Access is role-based and logged inside your systems, staff are trained and under confidentiality agreements, and we sign a Business Associate Agreement before any access is granted.
Can we keep our current biller and still work with EMB?
Many clients do. In the hybrid model we work alongside your existing biller, take the depth work such as denials, appeals, and aged A/R, and cover the gaps rather than replacing anyone.
From the library