PROJECT OVERVIEW
Presenting a Billing Platform as a Revenue Lifeline for Public Health
(Blog post | Public health EHR)
SNAPSHOT
Weekly blog series for an EHR and billing company serving public health departments.
GOAL
Show how my client’s billing services could turn unreimbursed COVID vaccinations into revenue, proving its value to budget-strapped departments.
MY ROLE
Came up with the topic, researched, and wrote the post.
APPROACH
Told the story of a Texas city that used my client’s platform to recover write-offs without adding staff or upfront costs, highlighting a clear financial win.
SUMMARY
Most public health departments weren’t bothering to claim reimbursements for uninsured COVID vaccinations—they saw it as too much work for too little return. This post flipped that perception by telling a simple, real-world story: how one Texas city recovered significant revenue without adding staff or upfront costs.
By focusing on a concrete financial win and tying it to a pain point administrators actually cared about—funding relief for overworked staff—I positioned my client not as “just another software vendor,” but as a practical, budget-friendly partner worth paying attention to.
WRITING SAMPLE
From Write Off to Revenue Stream
How One City Increased Funding through Mass Vax Events
Community health centers have been key in our nation’s ability to fight COVID-19. As of February 2022, they’d administered more than 19 million vaccinations, in spite of ample challenges around staff exhaustion, trauma and COVID infections.
The public health department in a large city in Texas fought on the frontlines as valiantly as any, standing up mass vaccination sites to provide free vaccines across its metropolitan health district.
At each site, health department staff served hundreds of patients, logging their information, tracking vaccine doses, ensuring accurate data was fed to the state’s immunization registry, and submitting claims information to insurance companies.
For patients lacking insurance, workers collected their information, but in the face of the overwhelming demands of vaccinating thousands per day, clinics wrote off the expense. Submitting the claims to the HRSA’s COVID-19 Coverage Assistance Fund while still maintaining the break-neck pace would have required hiring additional staff.
As the year went on however, the health department had time to reconsider this approach and began to explore the option of making an HRSA claim. With so many uninsured patients having been vaccinated, the reimbursement revenue would likely be significant and could provide needed financial support for better health in the community. Plus – after nearly two years fighting COVID, additional revenue could help ease the toll on workers still battling on the
frontlines.
The city would need to consolidate all the information associated with every uninsured vaccination and upload documentation to the agency to recoup the expenses – and they would have to complete the task within 90 days to meet the HRSA deadline.
Fortunately, because much of the information was already recorded electronically, the process could be partially automated. But with thousands of records involved, errors and gaps in the data and these would need to be researched and corrected, requiring significant data entry.
The city’s health department engaged ezEMRx’s Billing Services Platform to provide the support needed to submit the claims to HRSA. We automated reporting for the clean records, while for the records in error, our team made all necessary corrections to both meet the tight deadline and to maximize reimbursement. The city didn’t need to bring on additional staff to accommodate the extra work and our fee was charged as a percentage of reimbursement received, neutralizing expense impact on their budget.
Best of all, replacing write-offs with revenue allows the city the resources to provide some relief for the nurses and staff who have bravely and selflessly served during the pandemic.