Mark Pehl Medical Information Processor Finds Second Home In Spokane
The parade of California companies drifting into Spokane has slowed in the past couple of years, but, like Integrated Medical Services, they still show up from time to time.
IMS opened its Spokane operations in February with four employees, but company president Mark Pehl says that as time goes by, more and more of the company might be relocated here from its home base in Orange County.
“We’ve had a lot of people down south express interest in moving up here,” Pehl says.
Both the lease on IMS’s current Spokane space and its lease in California expire next year. And that will create the opportunity to do some personnel juggling between the two sites.
“My company occupies the whole third floor of a building down south, and basically we’re out of space there,” Pehl says. “With that lease ending in July, and my lease in Spokane ending in March, we’re going to have to make a decision about where we are going to go.”
IMS is a 10-year-old company that electronically processes medical information - primarily insurance claims - for the nation’s major insurance companies.
“We are a national company, probably one of the largest in the business right now,” Pehl says. Their clients include Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, and a growing national base beyond their original California market.
With medical cost pressures forcing providers to find savings wherever they can, more and more providers and insurers are trying to eliminate costly paperwork and the time-consuming mailing back and forth of forms by handling those transactions electronically via computer.
Pehl says IMS is a veteran player in a young industry that is just now beginning to hit its stride.
Blue Cross of California, for example, has mandated that independent physician associations under contract with Blue Cross handle claims electronically.
“They sent notice to all their participating providers that they are going to start dinging them $1 per claim if it’s not done electronically,” Pehl says.
IMS did $2 million in sales last year, the best year in the company’s history. This year, it is on track for $3.6 million in sales, and Pehl estimates that within five years, that number will grow to $15 million.
Pehl and his partner, Robert Weinberger, founded the company as Coast Medical Management in 1986. They thought they were founding a billing service to specialize in laboratory billings for California doctors.
The search for efficiency led them quickly to the fledgling business of processing computer-to-computer transactions.
They merged with another company in 1987 and the result was IMS. Originally, it was a company designed to sell computer software systems for electronic claims handling. IMS would sell the system, and then process the transactions.
“It took us about a year-and-a-half to figure out it was too competitive in the software business,” Pehl says, “so we went strictly into being a claims clearinghouse.”
The company currently processes about 2.5 million claims a month, and that number will grow as more and more administrative tasks become electronic rather than paper transactions.
Most of that processing is handled in Orange County. The company still writes its own software, and that, too, is done in California. But when each new client, whether it’s a medical service provider or an insurer, is added to the system, the company has to “verify their file specifications, and make sure all their date elements are correct,” Pehl says.
That testing is done in Spokane, and the task is growing rapidly. The company is advertising for additional employees, and Pehl anticipates a local staff that will grow to 15.
And because the testing done here is “almost the duplicate process of what we’re doing down south in actual production,” Pehl says he is considering equipping Spokane to be a production backup.
“Then, if anything goes wrong in California - natural disaster, fire, burglary, anything of that nature - we could at least get our top customers’ data processed out of this facility up here,” he adds.
The primary motivation in IMS’s expansion to Spokane was actually Pehl’s wife. Her job was transferred here from Southern California three years ago.
“I had been traveling back and forth on a weekly basis,” Pehl says, “and it just sort of made some sense to take advantage of the resources and opportunities up here in Spokane to start doing some of the testing and technical support.”
He still splits his time between the two sites, but is able to spend more time in Spokane. And he’s pleased enough with what he’s found here to at least consider bringing a bigger chunk of IMS’s operation to Spokane.
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