COLLINSVILLE, CONN. — Penstock Group is a healthcare payment integrity and reimbursement company that recently launched with the mission of lowering healthcare costs through permanently correcting recurring medical billing errors. By identifying chronic gaps in the billing processes of health plans, providers and self-insured employer groups, Penstock boosts its clients’ bottom line while disrupting healthcare auditing as a whole.
“There are many companies that identify coding errors when providers bill insurance companies,” says Jeff Snyder, VP of Operations at Penstock, “but they don’t prevent the same errors from happening over and over. Since the market rewards these companies for catching errors, they have no incentive to close the loop, and the result is rising healthcare costs. Penstock is adding much needed transparency by combining deep medical and pharmacy expertise with provider outreach and education in order to change the game.”
Penstock is an affiliate of Goodroot, which launches and grows companies dedicated to reinventing healthcare one system at a time. “Penstock is a perfect example of the Goodroot approach to changing healthcare for the better by tackling niche, solvable problems,” says Penstock President Jim Harper, who is also CFO of Goodroot. “Penstock’s willingness to put in the extra effort to ensure stakeholders on different levels of the healthcare system communicate effectively and operate with better financial efficiency represents a necessary step toward solving systemic problems like affordability and accessibility of healthcare.”
“The Penstock team,” continues Harper, “is composed of highly experienced and proficient healthcare coders, billing experts, pharmacists and technologists. The idea for Penstock grew out of their insights on improving how billing and coding are done, and their lack of a channel for that innovation at their previous jobs with major healthcare organizations.”
With $4 trillion in medical services billed each year in the US–an estimated 3-10 percent of which contain billing errors–the opportunity for Penstock in the marketplace is enormous. “By making error reduction a priority, it may seem like we’re trying to work ourselves out of a job,” says Chris Gallagher, VP of Delivery at Penstock, “but the need for what we’re doing is quite vast. With truth as our competitive differentiator, we’re confident that we can rapidly gain market share simply by doing the right thing.”
