MDeverywhere and the art of getting paid

The patient visit is over. The doctor has made a diagnosis, recorded a treatment and moved on. Yet the practice has another problem to solve: turning that encounter into money in the bank. MDeverywhere made its living in this interval. Its history is a reminder that a medical record and a paid claim are different accomplishments, even when they begin with the same patient.

A billing department in your pocket

Start with the handheld. In 2000, contemporary reporting described EveryCharge as a personal digital assistant application with more than 100,000 billing rules. Doctors could record diagnoses and treatments while an onboard rules engine checked the information. This was the Palm era: a small screen, a stylus and a surprisingly substantial administrative ambition.

The original company’s roots included a physician’s perspective. A June 2000 conference program identified Duke orthopedic surgeon Lloyd Hey as MDeverywhere’s founder and chairman. By 2003, the product family included EveryCharge, EveryNote for dictation, EveryOrder and EveryReference. They ran on Palm OS and Pocket PC handhelds as well as desktop workstations. The naming department had certainly found its rhythm.

That June, MDeverywhere joined Med e-Manager, a physician billing services company led by David Fetterolf. The transaction adviser described a practical combination: encounter-capture technology would become part of a revenue management service. Fetterolf said his company had first used MDeverywhere as a customer. The relationship became a merger. Useful software had found an operation capable of taking the next step.

The error arrives before the bill

Consider the logic of the later offering. A practice could verify insurance eligibility, check coding, submit claims, post payments and follow up on denials. Contract monitoring addressed another problem: whether a payment matched the payer’s agreed terms. These are connected jobs. Making one screen easier to use does little for a claim held up somewhere else.

Practice 1st, launched in 2011, put that logic into cloud software. Its 2013 release described real-time eligibility checks, coding edits at the point of care, appointment reminders and recalls. The product required no local software installation. MDeverywhere was selling an administrative system whose usefulness would ultimately be judged by collections, rather than by the elegance of its menus.

The ICD-10 transition made the design tangible. Practice 1st version 3.2, released in November 2013, separated procedure and diagnosis searches, provided code lookup in both directions and added a sandbox. Staff could rehearse the new coding system without altering live patient data. That last feature is wonderfully ordinary: when a change is complicated, give people somewhere safe to practice.

The humans behind the software

Software alone does not explain the company’s development. In her 2015 retrospective, former CEO Ann Bilyew described a business that had underperformed its promise. After becoming CEO in 2008, she reorganized sales and built teams around clients, tying incentives to client results. Her account makes the operational changes as consequential as the product releases.

Bilyew also described the decision to own the India processing operation, opened in 2005, so the company could control hiring, training and processes. The distinction matters. An automated claim still belonged to a service organization. Someone had to take responsibility when the workflow needed attention.

Credentialing widened that responsibility. In May 2011, Marlin announced the acquisition of Advanced Health Management Services, or AHMS. The business brought credentialing, coding and practice management expertise from work with hospitals, university faculty plans and physicians. For a revenue cycle provider, verifying qualifications and managing enrollment fitted naturally alongside the mechanics of submitting claims.

Paid when the practice collects

The commercial arrangement sharpened the proposition. In a May 2010 interview, Fetterolf said MDeverywhere charged a percentage of collections. He also described no upfront software license, training or implementation fees, and an agreement that could be cancelled. Those were historical terms; the interview did not name the percentage. They nevertheless reveal how the company framed its offer.

“we get paid a percentage of collection”David Fetterolf · May 2010

For a practice, the attraction is easy to understand: payment for the billing service moves with collections. The sensible comparison still includes the fee, the work the practice retains and the handling of exceptions. A practice with an effective internal team might prefer to keep those functions. A complicated specialty would need relevant billing expertise, however convenient the software looked.

MDeverywhere occupied the market for outsourced physician revenue operations combined with software. Athenahealth offers another combination of cloud tools and revenue cycle services. The useful comparison is scope: who checks the inputs, who works the rejected claims and who answers for the result? A product checklist alone cannot settle those questions.

The merger that bought time

The company repeatedly added capabilities through combinations. A 2013 agreement joined Henry Schein MicroMD’s clinical records to MDeverywhere’s financial software and services. In March 2015, Marlin merged MDeverywhere with e-MDs. The combined business operated under the e-MDs name and served more than 13,000 providers. Its larger customer count belonged to the combination.

At the time, e-MDs executive Patrick Hall said his company’s own cloud revenue cycle initiative was still underway; joining MDeverywhere would accelerate it. The later ownership change came in December 2020, when CompuGroup Medical completed its eMDs acquisition. The announced $240 million enterprise value covered the broader group. CGM’s 2025 report still lists MDeverywhere entities in its structure.

The lesson a reader can borrow is modest and demanding: move checks earlier, make someone responsible for the entire job and let people rehearse consequential changes. Those choices require reliable inputs, maintained rules and staff who can resolve exceptions. MDeverywhere’s story gives the supposedly dull back office its due. The visit ends. The work of getting paid continues.