Easter Washington

I've spent a little over 15 years in healthcare billing, and I've truly worked my way up from the bottom. I started as a follow-up representative, then moved into a call center role before becoming a traditional biller. Medicare became my one payer of focus that I personally like the best. From there, I grew to become an advocate and then a billing supervisor within my company. Now, I'm a quality analyst, a position I've held for a little over 6 months. In my day-to-day work, I review all claims, checking the DX codes and CPT/EPIC codes to make sure they fall within CMS guidelines. I focus on catching front-end edits to ensure claims are as clean as possible before they're submitted to the payer. On the back end, if there's a denial, I analyze the denial trends to see if there's a rule that has been updated within that payer that we haven't actually programmed into our system yet, so we can eliminate those denials on the front end. My goal is to make the billing and the denial process as seamless as possible and to lower that percentage of denials. One of my proudest moments was becoming an ARMS Employee of the Month in January of 2016 out of over 3,000 employees. When I worked in the call center, I actually had patients who would call to request to only speak to me to discuss their bills, and that was also a winning moment for me.