Payer Underpayment Recover Specialist

What You’ll Do

The Payer Underpayment Recovery Specialist is responsible for identifying, validating, documenting, and pursuing payer underpayments to ensure reimbursement is received in accordance with payer contracts, fee schedules, government reimbursement requirements, and organizational billing expectations. This role reviews payment variances, analyzes expected versus actual reimbursement, prepares supporting documentation, and works directly with payers to secure additional payment when underpayments are identified. This position plays a key role in improving net collection performance, reducing revenue leakage, and supporting a proactive revenue cycle operating model.

Responsibilities/Duties

• Identify potential payer underpayments by reviewing payment data, contractual allowed amounts, fee schedules, EOBs/ERAs, payer policies, claim history, and expected reimbursement calculations.
• Use Rivet, Modernizing Medicine, Athena, Excel, and payer portals to research reimbursement variances, validate expected payment, and document findings.
• Validate underpayment opportunities by comparing actual payments to contracted rates, payer reimbursement terms, authorization details, procedure coding, modifiers, bundling rules, and applicable payment policies.
• Research payer contracts, fee schedules, reimbursement methodologies, and payer-specific requirements to determine whether additional payment is supported.
• Prepare clear and complete documentation packages to support payer reconsideration, corrected payment requests, appeals, or escalation for additional reimbursement.
• Submit or coordinate submission of underpayment disputes, reconsideration requests, appeals, and payer inquiries within required payer timeframes.
• Track underpayment cases from identification through resolution, including payer response, payment outcome, write-off determination, and escalation status.
• Maintain Excel-based spreadsheets and trackers to monitor underpayment opportunities, dollars identified, dollars recovered, payer response, aging, and root cause trends.
• Partner with billing, coding, payment posting, payer collections, contracting, and revenue integrity teams to resolve payment discrepancies and prevent repeat underpayments.
• Identify trends by payer, CPT code, modifier, provider, practice, location, system, or contract term and escalate recurring issues for operational or contractual resolution.
• Support reporting on underpayment recovery, revenue impact, payer trends, aged cases, overturn rates, and process improvement opportunities.

Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare revenue cycle, payer collections, reimbursement analysis, contract variance review, payment posting, denials, or revenue integrity.
• Experience using Rivet, Modernizing Medicine, Athena, Excel, and spreadsheet-based trackers strongly preferred.
• Intermediate to advanced Excel proficiency required, including the ability to use formulas, filters, pivot tables, sorting, data validation, reconciliations, and large spreadsheet trackers to identify and document reimbursement variances.
• Strong understanding of EOBs, ERAs, payer contracts, fee schedules, CPT/HCPCS codes, modifiers, claim forms, payer policies, and reimbursement methodologies.
• Ability to analyze expected versus actual reimbursement and clearly explain payment variances.
• Strong written communication skills with the ability to prepare payer-facing documentation and escalation summaries.
• Detail-oriented with strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple underpayment cases through resolution.
• Experience with orthopedic, surgical, ASC, or specialty physician billing preferred.
• Knowledge of commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, workers' compensation, bundled payment, and value-based arrangements preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree preferred; relevant healthcare revenue cycle or reimbursement experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.

What We Offer

• Excellent growth and advancement opportunities
• Dynamic environment
• Access to a diverse network of practitioners
• Broad infrastructure of tools and programs to enhance the employee experience
• Competitive Compensation
• Generous PTO Benefits package: health, dental, vision, 401(k), etc.