SpecialtiesPrimary & acute care
How we see general practice billing.
Reviewed by the VisMed primary & acute care billing team
General practice sits between family medicine and urgent care: a wide mix of patients, a wide mix of services, and no single line item that dominates. The breadth is the difficulty. A biller who is fluent in E/M leveling may still fumble a joint injection, a skin biopsy, a spirometry, a wound repair and a vaccine on the same afternoon.
Breadth also makes undercoding easy to miss. With no dominant procedure to benchmark against, a practice cannot tell from its reports whether it is billing what it does. Only reading the notes shows that.
VisMed treats general practice as a coverage problem: your account team has to know every code family the practice touches, hold payer rules for every plan it sees, and reconcile every visit on the schedule to a claim daily. There is no clever trick, just completeness, and we build the team from your last year of charges.
Where general practice practices lose money
The patterns we find in the aging and denial history before anything else changes.
Procedures folded into the visit
Injections, cerumen removal, skin tag removal, nebulizer treatments and simple repairs are separately billable. Practices that document them in the visit note and bill only the E/M give them away.E/M leveled low by habit
Level follows decision-making or time. Physicians who still count body systems level down and never see a denial for it.Eligibility surprises
A broad payer mix means a lot of small plans with their own rules. A plan that lapsed or changed produces an eligibility denial weeks later.Modifier 25 and 59 applied wrong
Same-day procedure and visit, or two procedures on the same day, need the right modifier and the documentation to match. Wrong or missing, the second line is denied; over-applied, it is an audit flag.Small balances never collected
Copays and deductibles across a large volume of small visits add up. Without an estimate at check-in and clean statements, they age out.
What we do differently for general practice
Specialty-matched coders and a denials specialist, working inside your own system.
We cover every code family you actually bill
We build your account team from the charge data we see in onboarding, matching coders to every family you touched last year, rather than assuming a generic primary-care mix.We capture procedures at charge entry
Our encounter forms and templates prompt for the separately billable procedures, and a coder checks the note supports each line before it goes out.We verify eligibility two days ahead
Verification with copay and deductible status pushed to the appointment, so your desk collects the right amount.We reconcile daily and summarize weekly
Every appointment closes as a claim or a reason, and you get a plain-English weekly note from us rather than a dashboard to interpret.
What we bill
The procedure and code families your account team already works in.
General practice billing, asked and answered.
What a physician-owner in this specialty asks on the first call.
We do a bit of everything. Can one VisMed team really cover it?
Yes, because VisMed builds the team from your charge data during onboarding. We look at what you actually billed in the last year and assign coders who know each of those families, rather than assuming a standard primary-care mix.
How does VisMed find undercoding in a practice with no dominant procedure?
By reading notes. VisMed compares a rolling sample of visits, plus every visit with a documented procedure, against what was billed. The findings go to the physician as a short weekly note.
Does VisMed handle the small patient balances?
VisMed posts accurately, gives the desk an estimate at check-in, sends clear statements and sets up card-on-file options in your system. Small balances are a volume problem, and volume is what we are set up for.
What if a payer we use is unusual or regional?
VisMed enrolls with it and learns its rules during onboarding. Every plan you see gets its own entry in our pre-submission checks, regardless of size.
How quickly can VisMed take over a general practice?
Access, payer setup and workflow review typically take VisMed two to three weeks. We start on your aged AR in the first week, because that is where recoverable money already sits.
Also in primary & acute care
Family medicine
Preventive, chronic and acute visits under one cycle.
Internal medicine
E/M leveling, chronic-care codes and complex payers.
Pediatrics
Well-child schedules, vaccines and Medicaid rules.
Geriatrics
Medicare-heavy panels, TCM and annual wellness.
Urgent care
Walk-in registration, S-codes and fast turnaround.
Emergency medicine
Facility and professional claims, critical-care time.
Osteopathic medicine
OMT with E/M on the same visit, modifier-correct.
Sleep medicine
Studies, home testing and DME crossover.
Sports medicine
Injections, imaging and therapy bundles.
All specialties
The full list, in six groups
See where your general practice practice is losing money. Free.
Six months of aging and denials, read by people who bill your specialty every day — quantified as monthly leakage with a recovery estimate. Yours to keep.
or write directly hello@vis.med