From Psychotherapists to Healthcare Billing Company Experts
Founded in 1990, Psychotherapy Associates of North Reading, Massachusetts, began offering health insurance to its clinicians in 2004. This created an “ah-ha” moment for Co-director, Rick Kaufman, a licensed clinical social worker, who leaned in to learn the regulations and complex process requirements and coded his own automated billing solution for his practice. At the same time, he and his colleague, Donna Whipple, recognized the potential of this tool to simplify billing for other private mental health practices. This was the beginning of their second business, Billing Advantage.
It wasn’t long before Billing Advantage began to build out its staff and expertise, to offer services to a growing range of healthcare specialties.
“You can’t support your own Revenue Cycle Management system alone and run a business,” says Kaufman. “As we added additional specialties, it got more and more complex.” So, he conducted a competitive review of billing systems, and ultimately selected Tebra. Today the company supports nearly 200 practices including mental health, OB/GYN, plastic surgery, speech and language specialties.
Building Thriving Billing Businesses with Tebra’s API
Billing Advantage leveraged Tebra’s Application Programming Interface (API) to extend its business even further, via automation, for itself and its customers.
For its own use, the company streamlined its invoicing and reporting from weeks to minutes, using Tebra.
“We created our own code called K-Link, which allows us —via the Tebra API— to automate custom reporting for many of our customers and to do all of our invoicing,” adds Kaufman. “With 191 practices in 2025, if we had to do manual invoicing it would take us more than 91 hours a month. Instead, because we have access to the Tebra API we get all of the data from Tebra, and through our K-Link, all payments are listed, all reports—including customized reports—are done automatically. It requires about 5 minutes per report to review for any errors. With Tebra, our reporting is so much easier than it would be with any other software.”
That really adds up: Kaufman calculates about a $25,000 annual savings in staff time that is used to create client service instead of manual invoices and reports.
For its customers, Billing Advantage built a new platform, Upload Advantage, for seamlessly importing data into Tebra from an Excel spreadsheet. Kaufman partners with Tebra to make it accessible. “Today, our customers include other billing companies as well as individual practices. Billing companies can have customers using other billing software. In fact, we support about 15 other systems across our customers. Prior to Upload Advantage, on Tebra’s API, they had to manually input and collate the disparate sets of data.”
Consolidating data from disparate sources is an onerous daily job. For example, Kaufman says that his billing company customers record between a few hundred to about 1,000 encounters a day. Encounters can include anything from demographics, charges, patient payments—and typically take two minutes each to input. That is upwards of 33 hours a day of data inputs for the larger billing companies.
To centralize their reporting and update that data into Tebra—instead of weeks to manually type in thousands of encounters—Upload Advantage can upload and modify patient data in one click, requiring each billing company to spend about 2 hours to review and address any error reports. “The difference is dramatic,” says Kaufman. “For just one day’s worth of work, we cut our large customer’s cost by about 82% from about $41,600 per day (about the cost of one full time person per day) to less than $7,200. For independent healthcare practices just coming on board with Tebra, who only need a one-time import of data, Upload Advantage makes it easy for them to upload their files from the start—and very quickly.
“Other software platforms export the data in multiple formats. Upload Advantage can take data in many formats and upload it into Tebra, which is a win for our customers, for us and for Tebra,” says Kaufman. Today, Tebra is not only a technology provider but a key partner to Kaufman, as a great source of referral business for his Upload Advantage practice.
Beyond Billing: Balancing a Private Practice too
Kaufman’s deepening experience in billing led to new innovations to streamline process and optimize revenue for himself and his Billing Advantage and Upload Advantage customers. If that wasn’t enough, he still managed his original “day job” running a psychotherapy clinic, and seeing therapy clients.
How does he do it all?
Rick Kaufman leans into a talented team, as well as support at home to keep all of the many aspects of his work life on track. “I know how to do all of the functions—from therapy to revenue cycle management and administration—so I can fill in if one person is out. But that doesn’t scale: so our wonderful team of therapists, billers and business partners are key to making everything work well.”
And, as an avid technologist, he taps software to optimize his operations—and those of his customers too.
“When we first found Tebra for billing, 17 years ago, they didn’t yet have an EHR solution. Once they offered it, we switched from Practice Fusion to Tebra, as we liked having an all-in-one option.”
“Tebra’s EHR solution is really intuitive,” continues Kaufman. “Our clinicians can set up notes any way they want: either using Tebra’s pre-formatted sections or making their own templates and notes. We also appreciate the patient information, such as context on different conditions or modalities, that we can share with patients to supplement our engagement with them.
“We also recommend Tebra’s tools to our business customers. Many of them leverage Tebra’s Clinical EHR for tracking prescriptions and empowering telehealth options. Also, many new practices take advantage of Tebra’s Patient Experience solutions to build their own brand awareness and client demand.”
Growing in a Challenging Regulated-Insurance Environment
“In 2025, we want to continue to expand. We’ve had a lot of growth, in part through great referrals from Tebra. In today’s climate, insurance companies are becoming harder to deal with: they are short staffed, and it is harder to get claims approved. Therefore, we will continue to lean into technology and support from Tebra to make the payor process easier for us and our customers.
“I recommend Tebra to other practices and billing companies due to the quality of the product and the terrific support from people across the business. I believe business is personal, and I am so grateful for the ongoing, trusted relationships I’ve developed with people at Tebra, where we help each other out to bring the best to our businesses,” concludes Kaufman.
