Free eligibility review
Home / Resources / IDR companies
Comparison

How to choose an IDR filing partner

There are five ways to get disputes filed. They fail in different ways, and the right answer depends on your volume, your specialty mix, and whether anyone owns the calendar.

The five models

1. In-house billing team

Cheapest on paper. Works when someone owns the deadline calendar and nothing else competes for their attention. It usually breaks at the four-business-day initiation window and at batch construction — both are unforgiving and neither is what a biller is trained for.

2. Law firm

Appropriate when there's an actual legal dispute — an unpaid award, a coverage fight, a payer pattern worth litigating. Expensive per claim for routine filings, and IDR is mostly not a legal exercise: arbitrators weigh clinical and market evidence, not legal argument.

3. Contingency filing service

A vendor files everything end to end and takes a percentage of what it recovers. Aligned incentives, no upfront cost, and the vendor's economics push toward filing volume. Ask what happens to claims they decline, whether you keep the underlying data, and what the fee applies to — recovery above the original payment, or the whole award.

4. Software platform

You license a tool and your team runs the process. Good if you have staff and want control; the work doesn't disappear, it just gets better instrumented. Subscription cost is fixed whether or not you win.

5. RCM vendor add-on

Your existing biller adds IDR as a line item. Convenient, and often shallow — IDR is a specialty within a specialty, and a generalist RCM shop rarely maintains determination benchmarks by payer and code.

Questions worth asking any vendor

  • What share of your filed disputes are found ineligible? (This is the number that separates operators from volume shops.)
  • How do you construct offers — what evidence, from what data?
  • How do you batch, and what's your average items per batch?
  • What happens after an award: who chases the 30-day payment deadline?
  • Do we keep our own dispute history if we leave?
Where we sit: IDR Filings is a contingency filing service. We screen for eligibility before filing rather than after, batch to the rules, build offers from determination data, and follow awards through to payment. You keep your data. We charge nothing if we don't recover more than the plan already paid.

Named alternatives

Providers evaluating vendors usually also look at HaloMD and Pivotal Health. Both pages are factual comparisons, not attacks.

Free claims review

Send 90 days of out-of-network remits. We'll tell you which claims are IDR-eligible, what comparable disputes have paid, and what we'd file. No fee unless we win you more.

Start a review

Find out what your out-of-network claims are actually worth.

Send us a sample of recent OON remits. We'll tell you which claims are IDR-eligible, what similar disputes have paid, and what we'd file. No fee unless we win you more.

Request a free eligibility review