Issue Date: July 2008 Issue, Posted On: 7/7/2008

Close to Home
Eris Medical found the right resources in Northeast Ohio to launch its health care billing management software.

Jennifer Wexler and Kelly Bucci are on a mission: They are the finders of lost revenue.

The two former health care consultants created Eris Medical Technologies to help health care providers analyze bills to spot missing charges.

And those mistakes are costing everyone. The average American paid approximately 10 percent more for health care last year than they did in 2006, according to the National Coalition on Health Care.

Some of those escalating costs are due to lost revenue from hospitals and doctors’ offices forgetting to charge patients for tests or procedures. With health insurance companies fighting every claim down to the last dollar, health care providers say these errors are eating into their bottom lines.

For example, the total cost of a routine procedure, such as caring for a broken arm, may include charges from multiple departments for devices, supplies and treatments that would be billed to the insurance company. This requires multiple IT systems and unrelated personnel to work in harmony, which doesn’t always happen.

So Eris’ software system, erisRx, links individuals in every department to the entire computer network, holding them each accountable for catching mistakes.

"We’re very niche," says Bucci, a principal at the firm. "We’re very focused on charge capture while our competitors have their hands in a few different areas."

Charge capture isn’t new. Hospital systems have departments dedicated to just those duties. What is unique, however, is a software system that uses complex statistical formulas to spot errors or inconsistencies in bills before and after they are sent to the insurance company for payment.

On average, erisRx has found errors in 50 to 60 percent of the bills it analyzes. The duo estimates health care providers can add 1 to 2 percent to their bottom line by using Eris’ product. With $2.7 trillion spent on health care in the U.S. last year, that’s a huge market.

"The business process that we use in this tool is patent‐pending," says Wexler, a Warren native who worked as a department manager for an Orlando hospital system. "It’s not out there, even among our competitors."

Before branching out on their own in 2007, Wexler, 34, also principal at the firm, met Bucci, 33, at Deloitte Consulting after Wexler left Florida. They realized the potential market for Eris, but developing health care software is expensive because it must meet numerous federal regulations for Medicare and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

To this point, they have been able to support the venture with about $500,000 of their own funds. Yet they still needed to keep costs low and find business expertise and health care contacts to help grow the company. They found both solutions close to home.

This year, Eris Medical earned a spot in the Youngstown Business Incubator, a downtown Youngstown startup accelerator that provides abated rent, office space and equipment and free Internet services.

Eris is also a portfolio company of BioEnterprise, a Cleveland‐based economic development group that links young companies in the medical and bioscience fields to funding, networking and business growth resources such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University Hospitals and Summa Health System in Akron.

In May, Eris Medical scored a major milestone by landing Youngstown‐based hospital system Humility of Mary Health Partners as its first beta client. Humility of Mary is part of Catholic Healthcare Partners, which is one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the United States and the largest in Ohio.

"We’re very excited to get started with them," says Wexler, whose software was to be implemented at the hospitals in June. "That will give us an opportunity to show the results we know we can deliver."