About Thorne Ambulance Services

Thorne Ambulance currently has over 80 personnel, a fleet of over 20 vehicles, and an in-house billing department with 3 full-time personnel. When they were established in 2010, however, they were much smaller and had a lower call volume. At the time, they employed a third-party billing company but found themselves facing some frustrations. After trying another third-party billing company, Thorne Ambulance still felt that they lacked control over the billing process, and brought billing in-house with ZOLL RescueNet billing. They were announced as one of the 20 fastest growing companies in South Carolina across all industries.

The Challenge

Thorne Ambulance’s major challenge was dealing with the frustrations of a 3rd party billing company. They faced incredibly slow turnaround times on claim submissions, as well as absences from billing specialists that led to significant lag and disruptions in their cash flow. They felt that they had no control over the billing process.

The Solution

Switching to ZOLL RescueNet Billing was a first step that helped increase their secondary insurance payments. Due to successful ZOLL implementation, it was an easy transition. When Billing Pro was introduced in 2017, they seamlessly switched over and saw their total payments increase by 116%.

“I was actually cornered by my three billers and what they said was that ZOLL had come out with a program that sounded so amazing that we had to take the chance and had to take the risk of bringing this product onboard and seeing how good it truly was.”

Thorne praised Billing Pro for being an extremely user-friendly and efficient piece of software.

“The info is accessible on one screen versus several tabs. So instead of having to tab through and wait on the lag time from tab to tab you have everything you need to build that claim right there in front of your eyes. It is well organized and it's all right there.”

The Benefits

Since implementing Billing Pro, the number of accounts receivable greater than 90 days dropped to 23 percent. Additionally, Medicare payments have increased by 31 percent, insurance payments have increased by 59 percent, and patient payments have increased by 79 percent. The use of Billing Pro and an increase in call volume caused total payments increase by 116 percent.

The Social Security number search helped clean up the patient database and get rid of duplicate records, while the address finder feature helped decrease the amount of returned mail they had before implementing Billing Pro.

In 2017 Thorne Ambulance averaged 4500 claims per biller and are expecting around 5700 claims per biller for 2018. Billing Pro has helped increase the efficiency of the billing process and reduce billing lag time by 89 percent.

“In many ways we actually see Billing Pro as a full-time biller based on the amount of time that it reduces out of our billing staff.”

Features that benefits were attributed to:

• Social Security number search
• Phone number discovery tab
• Address finder feature
• Insurance discovery application
• A well-organized system

Thorne Ambulance Services has seen a tremendous amount of growth in the last year: “We've actually been announced as one of the 20 fastest growing companies in South Carolina and that is not healthcare specific—that is across all industries,” said Thorne. “We attribute a lot of that success and a lot of that growth to a lot of the things that we've done and been able to do with Billing Pro.”