Reducing AR Days Through Denial Root-Cause Analysis
Reduced
AR Days
Root-caused & declining
Denials
Corrected upstream
Recurring Errors
Retrained on root-cause
Billing Team
How Medeoan cut AR days for a home health agency by replacing reactive denial rework with a CARC/RARC-aligned root-cause and trending program.
The Challenge
A medium-sized home health agency serving both traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage members ran its revenue cycle with an in-house billing team. Over three consecutive quarters, accounts receivable aging beyond 90 days climbed steadily, tying up cash and masking where revenue was actually leaking. Leadership could see the AR number worsening but had no reliable way to explain why. Denials were being worked reactively, one claim at a time, with no classification by category — coding, eligibility, authorization, and medical necessity were all handled as a single undifferentiated queue. There was no visibility into denial patterns by payer or admission type, so recurring problems stayed invisible. Staff resubmitted claims to clear the queue without diagnosing or fixing the underlying cause, which meant the same errors kept returning and aged AR kept growing.
Our Solution
Medeoan took over AR follow-up and rebuilt the denial workflow around root cause rather than resubmission volume. The first step was a CARC/RARC-aligned denial taxonomy that classified every denial into a consistent category — coding, eligibility, authorization, or medical necessity — so denials could finally be counted, compared, and trended instead of just cleared. Using that taxonomy, the team produced a 90-day denial trending report that segmented denials by payer and admission type, surfacing the concentrated patterns that reactive claim-by-claim work had hidden. Those patterns pointed directly at the upstream fixes: front-end eligibility verification gaps and coding errors that were generating avoidable denials before claims ever went out the door. With the drivers identified, Medeoan drove corrections at the source — tightening front-end eligibility checks and correcting coding practices so recurring errors were prevented rather than reworked. In parallel, the team worked the aged AR backlog while retraining the agency's internal billing staff on the same root-cause workflows, so the improvements would hold after the engagement rather than depend on ongoing rescue work.