Startup AccuCode AI Tackles Medical Billing Errors With Artificial Intelligence

Nathan Myers grew tired of his friend Scott Roper canceling their Dungeons & Dragons game night because of work at his medical billing company.

In health care billing, “you always run into a lot of unique and challenging problems you’re always trying to fix,” said Roper, vice president administration of Professional Consulting Services Inc. of Conway.

Myers, who has started a few startup companies, said to Roper, “Can’t we fix this? Can we automate this? Like, what? Are you living in the 18th century?”

In 2023, Myers, Roper and Myers’ former employee, Stephanie Howanietz, started brainstorming on how to improve health care billing by using artificial intelligence. AccuCode AI Inc. was the result.

The company operates out of the Little Rock Technology Park.

Myers, president and CEO of the company, said that the providers’ data was the problem. “Getting good, accurate data that’s in a structured format solved a lot of issues downstream,” Myers said. “So we developed proprietary technology” and have a patent pending for it.

By solving the data issue, other issues “like medical coding or clinical quality measures or anything else with health care data is a lot easier for us, because we fixed the upstream process,” he said.

Roper, who is vice president of business development and COO of AccuCode AI, said AccuCode AI can understand the doctor’s notes and assign, based on the documentation, the correct code that providers and insurance companies use to bill for medical services.

“The elimination of errors increases the amount of reimbursements,” said Mike Steely, chief revenue officer for the company.

AccuCode AI touts itself as being 99.9% accurate. “We build siloed AI models for individual clients that are trained on their own data, and it’s not shared to other clients,” Myers said. “So that’s one of the ways that we can keep the accuracy up is because … we’re building these custom models specifically for their use case and their documents.”

Having claims denied is a widespread problem. The 2023 KFF Survey of Consumer Experiences With Health Insurance found that 58% of insured adults said they have experienced a problem using their health insurance, including denied claims. Nearly 40% of those who reported having trouble paying medical bills said that denied claims contributed to their problem, according to KFF, an independent source of health policy research and polling.

Myers said the company’s system can help capture the missing health care codes so claims aren’t denied. The company is processing claims for about 90 providers, and it has a contract with “a very large health care facility” that it expects to announce this month, Myers said.