ANSWERS · OPERATIONS

Who is responsible for appealing denied claims in a practice?

In most practices no single role owns denial appeals — the biller submits and posts, the front desk fixes eligibility, and appeals fall into the gap between them. That's why denials get written off: it's technically someone's job, so in practice it's nobody's job. Assigning a named owner with a weekly denial-work cadence is the single highest-leverage fix.

Written forPractice OwnerPractice Manager

What actually matters

  • Map your revenue cycle and name who owns each step — intake, coding, submission, posting, appeals; the appeals box is usually empty
  • Denials run on timely-filing clocks, so an unowned appeal expires silently and becomes a permanent write-off
  • In-house teams lose appeal knowledge when a biller leaves; outsourced billers are incentivized to skip low-dollar appeals
  • Give appeals a weekly cadence and a tracked win rate, or they default to write-offs
  • Decide explicitly what you appeal versus write off — a defensible policy beats abandoning by default

Common questions

Should the biller or the practice handle appeals?

Either can, but only if appeals are explicitly assigned and tracked. Trouble comes from the practice assuming the biller does it while the biller assumes the low-dollar ones aren't worth it — leaving no one accountable.

What happens to denials nobody owns?

They expire against timely-filing deadlines and become permanent write-offs. Because they rarely appear as a line item, the loss stays invisible until someone reconciles denied-claim dollars against recoveries.

Where Volari fits: Volari can own the denial-appeal function outright — working every winnable claim to payment on contingency — so the accountability gap closes without adding headcount.

Give your denials an owner.

Volari works every winnable denial and underpayment to payment on contingency — the appeals box on your org chart, filled. No risk, paid only on what we recover.

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