WOUNDGENEX
|
WOUND CARE BILLING AND MANAGEMENT
Helping Clinics Easily Process Claims Faster
with Azalea AI Billing Assistant’s Claim Status Inquiry Feature
WoundGenex is a rapidly growing division of Genesis Healthcare and holds the client contracts referred to here. WoundGenex optimizes wound care billing and management for wound care centers, physician practices, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities. And Genesis is one of the nation’s leading providers of outsourced healthcare revenue cycle and payment solutions.
WoundGenex’ largest client processes more than 50,000 claims a month. And with traditional billing workflows, it was impossible for the WoundGenex team to know which claims needed follow up without looking at each one in a payer portal or making a call. That manual complexity created staffing challenges for WoundGenex and extended its AR turnaround times.
Location: Tampa, Florida
Staff: 100+
Services: Wound care billing and management for wound care centers, physician practices, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities
AI Billing Assistant user since: 2025
“Our claim volume required a more intelligent way to focus staff resources. We realized that technology could empower our team to manage complexity more effectively than traditional staffing models,” said WoundGenex CEO and Cofounder Tom Smith.
At volumes that high, WoundGenex needed a way to empower staff to focus on the claims that really needed attention and deliver a faster turnaround time. Instead of trying to endlessly scale staffing, Tom and his team looked for ways to streamline claim follow-up. Their goal: give the AR staff time to focus on resolving needed denials and maintaining strong client relationships instead of manually checking the status of each claim.
“Our goal was to optimize AR efficiency by reducing time spent on redundant manual tasks, allowing our team to focus on meaningful claim resolution and client engagement,” Jennifer Childress, WoundGenex senior director of operations, shared.
Automating Claim Status Inquiry and Resolving Claims Faster
WoundGenex found its solution with Azalea AI Billing Assistant and its Claim Status Inquiry feature. To make sure it would work for its AR team, WoundGenex initially turned it on only for its largest account.
Within weeks, Billing Assistant was being used everyday to help the team triage claims faster, eliminate unnecessary steps, and spot issues before remits came in. The tool uses AI to automatically flag possible issues for billers before they’re submitted. They’re saved from finding the issue and can simply solve it — saving time and letting them submit cleaner claims and reduce denials.
The Billing Assistant Claims Status Inquiry feature also identifies claims that don’t need follow up, so billers can focus only on those that do without having to manually verify claims status for each claim.
Jennifer shared that by automating status inquiries with AI Billing Assistant, the company’s AR specialists can focus their attention on claims that really need intervention instead of manually reviewing every account.
With WoundGenex’s claim volume, they previously had to prioritize follow-up based on payer trends. “Automating claim status inquiry gives us real-time visibility across all claims, which has significantly shortened the AR cycle,” Jennifer said.
Saving Money and Building Client Relations One Claim at a Time
For one client, the WoundGenex team identified an issue for recurring treatment series weeks before they would have normally seen it. That let the client practice adjust its care plan and avoid providing services that it wouldn’t get reimbursed for.
“We were able to update the practice right away — within a week and a half of them providing the service — so they could stop and pivot before losing money,” said Jennifer. “That saved the practice a ton of money and improved the client relationship.”
Ready to Expand with a Valuable Tool for All Practice Sizes
Tom shared that the tool “helped our team shift from reactive follow-up to proactive management. We can now identify and act on exceptions immediately instead of spending time verifying what’s already on track.”
Jennifer added that it really has freed up time for the team to do higher level things. The team was glad to have the tool. Jennifer said, “It transformed the team’s perception of AR management by turning what was once a reactive process into a structured, achievable workflow.”
In fact, Tom and Jennifer feel so good about the pilot with their largest account that they’re ready to start using Billing Assistant with more of WoundGenexs’ accounts.
Jennifer shared that the value of AI Billing Assistant isn’t limited to its own larger accounts or larger practices. “Normally smaller or midsize practices doing their own billing are tasked with so many different things that this tool would pay for itself and give that in-house team a little breathing room to do some of the other parts of the revenue cycle,” she said.
Before Azalea AI Billing Assistant
- Staffing challenges created by needing to manually touch thousands of claims a month
- Delayed turnaround on claims due to staffing challenges and claim volume
- No visibility into which claims were denied versus approved without manual follow up on each claim
- Lack of visibility into clearinghouse rejections before remits came in
With Azalea
- Faster AR turnaround — flagging claims that required follow up ended the need to follow up on all claims, which shortened the follow-up cycle so claims get processed faster
- Fewer claims go unresolved because there isn’t time to follow up on them without adding staff
- Staff empowerment by freeing them to work smarter and faster, meet their goals, and focus on higher priorities
Automating claim status inquiry gives us real-time visibility across all claims, which has significantly shortened the AR cycle.
Download the Full Case Study
Want to learn more? Download the full case study below.