EMB runs the complete revenue cycle for surgery centers: a dedicated team working inside your EHR and clearinghouse, accountable to the people who run the center. This page walks through how it works, how the transition period goes, and what it has produced for centers like yours.
Your dedicated team
Five roles added, none of them on your payroll
Collections
4x
Ophthalmology ASC, first 12 months
Eligibility verified for tomorrow's schedule
In most centers the billing relationship is selected centrally, by executive leadership or a platform's finance group. The day-to-day consequences are local. Prior authorization issues surface at the front office. Patients call the center about charges the center didn't generate. The billing company is hard to reach, and the person who has to answer for all of it is the administrator.
That is an accountability gap, not a performance problem, and it doesn't resolve itself with a better report. It resolves when someone specific owns the outcome and can be reached by the people living with it.
A shared inbox, a rotating contact, a response window measured in days. Your front office can't get a straight answer about a claim they are already fielding calls about, so the question travels back up through leadership and returns as a summary. By then the case is older and nothing about it is easier.
The gap in this market isn't software or Fee percentages. It's the absence of a named person who owns the outcome and picks up the phone.
Your team is named. Your front office has their direct lines and uses them, without routing through leadership first. Underneath that sits the visibility: because the work happens in your EHR and clearinghouse, anyone at the center can open any claim on any day and see exactly where it stands.
Leadership gets the other half of it: cleaner collections, a shorter revenue cycle, and a P&L they can defend. The same arrangement satisfies both, which is usually why it survives the review.
Before the Monday review
All work happens inside your own EMR, clearinghouse, and practice management system, visible always.
Your team is named. You know who they are, and you can reach them directly.
No dollar written off without your approval.
Thirty days notice, your data stays in your systems, leaving never costs you your history.
Compare the fully loaded cost of your revenue cycle operation against EMB using your own numbers. No contact information required.
Current model
Estimated annual RCM cost
$137,500
Loaded payroll $137,500
EMB
Estimated annual fee
$63,000
Applied rate: 3.5% of monthly insurance collections ($5,250/mo)
Estimated annual operating-cost difference
+$74,500
Based only on the operating costs you entered. This comparison does not account for differences in collections, AR performance, underpayments, write-offs, or staff capacity.
Pricing shown reflects EMB's standard full-service RCM tiers based on monthly insurance collections. Final scope and pricing are confirmed after reviewing the center's revenue cycle and service requirements.
Want to look beyond operating cost? We'll review the aging, denials, payer performance, and workflow behind the numbers.
A percentage on a proposal is easy to compare. The harder number is what the current model costs in total: billing payroll, management time, turnover and coverage, front-office work pushed back by the billing function, aged receivables, preventable write-offs, and revenue that takes too long to become cash.
EMB is designed to change both sides of that equation: the cost of operating the revenue cycle and the amount of collectible revenue that actually reaches the bank.
What does the center actually spend to staff, supervise, cover, and support the revenue cycle?
What collectible revenue is being lost before it ever reaches the bank?
How much working capital stays trapped in AR because completed cases take too long to become cash?
“The question for ownership isn't whether outsourced billing has a fee. It's whether the center produces more cash, with less internal overhead and less revenue at risk, after that fee is paid.”
Don't take the economics on faith. See what changed at actual centers.
Stop carrying accountability for a function you don't control.
You startStart handing it to a team that answers for it in writing.
Stop routing every billing question through a central contact.
You startStart letting your front office call the person doing the work.
Stop waiting weeks for a report you'll have to re-cut anyway.
You startStart opening the claim yourself, in your own system, today.
Stop absorbing the blame for prior auth and patient billing fallout.
You startStart pointing to a named owner for each of them.
So it runs in parallel, in your systems, with no single cutover date and no migration to survive.
Access to your systems, a full read of your current aging, payer mix, and denial patterns, and a named team introduced by name and direct line. No changes to your workflow yet.
New claims move to us while the existing work finishes cleanly. Nothing hinges on a single cutover date, and nothing gets dropped in the handoff.
At ninety days you get a straight read on what we found, what we fixed, and what is still open, including the parts that aren't flattering to us.
Keep your existing biller. We work alongside them, take the depth work, and cover the gaps. Plenty of our clients never let anyone go.
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.
98% first-pass clean claim rate, and we'll show you exactly how we count it. Ask us how we measure it.
All figures from the center's billing data.
“Our biller has been here nine years. I'm not putting her out of a job.”
Then don't. The hybrid model keeps her exactly where she is and puts depth behind her: denials, appeals, aged claims, and coverage when she's out. She stops being a single point of failure, which is usually the thing she's most tired of being.
“If I bring this up, it looks like I've been missing something.”
Most of what we're describing sits outside the administrator's control by design. The numbers make that case better than any of us can, and we're happy to help you put them in front of leadership.
“We just switched two years ago. I can't put us through that again.”
The transition period is built around that concern. A parallel period rather than a cutover, and because the work happens in your systems, there's no migration to survive. One of our case studies is a center that changed partners during a merger.
“How do I know you won't just write off what you can't collect?”
No dollar gets written off without your sign-off. Every adjustment carries a name and a reason, in your system, where you can pull it up later.
“Our billing partner is chosen at the corporate level. This isn't my call.”
Understood, and that's the common structure. Most of our conversations start with an administrator and end with a leadership review. We'll put the operational picture and the P&L picture in the same document so it travels up the chain intact.
“What happens to our data if this doesn't work out?”
Thirty days notice and it's already yours. Nothing lives in our platform, because there isn't one between you and your records. Leaving never costs you your history.
Three numbers are worth pulling: the share of your A/R sitting past 90 days, your first-pass acceptance rate, and your collections per visit over the last four quarters. Together they show whether the revenue cycle is performing, and just as usefully, who has been answering for it.
Common benchmarks put aged A/R in the low double digits as a share of total, and first-pass acceptance in the mid to high nineties. Treat those as general industry guidelines, ranges vary by specialty and payer mix. The point isn't the benchmark, it's whether your own trend is moving the wrong way.
The Surgery Center Audit walks the same three numbers with you, and it's yours without talking to anyone.
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.