We Don't Write Off Denials: Inside Our 72-Hour Appeal Process

Here's something most practices never find out about their billing: a large share of denied claims are simply written off. Not because they couldn't be won — because chasing them takes time, and whoever handles billing is already stretched thin. The denial gets marked as a loss, the revenue quietly disappears, and nobody ever knows how much money walked out the door. At MYRI, we do the opposite. Every denial is treated as recoverable revenue until proven otherwise — and the clock starts the moment a claim is rejected.

Why denials get written off (and why that's expensive)

A denied claim isn't a dead claim. It's revenue you already earned, sitting in a payer's system, waiting for someone to act. But acting takes work: figuring out why it was denied, correcting the issue, gathering documentation, and filing a formal appeal within the payer's deadline. In a busy practice where one person handles billing between a dozen other tasks, that work rarely happens fast enough — and denials pile up until they age out. Across a year of claims, quietly written-off denials often add up to tens of thousands of dollars in lost, recoverable revenue.

Most billing companies write off denials. We don't. Every rejection is investigated, corrected, and formally appealed — because a denial is the start of a process, not the end of a claim.

The 72-hour rule

Speed matters with denials, for two reasons. First, payers have appeal deadlines — wait too long and the window closes permanently. Second, the longer a denial sits, the colder the trail: documentation is harder to gather, and the claim slips further down the priority list. That's why we work denials on a 72-hour standard. Within three days of a rejection, every denial is investigated, categorized, and either corrected and resubmitted or formally appealed. Nothing sits. Nothing ages out unnoticed.

What actually happens to a denied claim

When a claim is denied, here's the process it goes through:

• Identified fast — denials are caught within a day, not discovered weeks later during a month-end review.
• Investigated — we determine the real reason for the denial, not just the generic code the payer attached to it.
• Categorized — is this a simple correction, a documentation issue, or a true medical-necessity dispute? Each path is handled differently.
• Corrected and resubmitted, or formally appealed — with the specific documentation that supports the care provided.
• Tracked through to final payment — so nothing disappears back into the payer's system unwatched.
• Pattern-checked — if the same denial keeps recurring, we fix the upstream cause so it stops happening at all.

The result: an average 30% drop in denial rates

When denials are worked consistently and fast — and when recurring causes get fixed rather than just re-filed — denial rates fall. Practices that switch to MYRI see an average 30% reduction in their denial rates. That's not from a single trick; it's the compounding result of catching denials early, appealing the winnable ones, and eliminating the patterns that generate denials in the first place.

Why chiropractic-specific matters here

Denial management is where a general billing company most often falls short with chiropractic claims. Medicare's spinal-manipulation coverage rules, the AT modifier, medical-necessity documentation standards, and the state-by-state quirks of personal injury and PIP claims are all specialized knowledge. A biller who works across every specialty frequently doesn't have the depth to win these appeals — so they write them off. Because chiropractic is the only specialty we work in, we know which denials are worth fighting and exactly how to win them.

Find out what your denials are costing you

If you don't know your practice's denial rate — or what share of your denials actually get appealed — there's a good chance recoverable revenue is slipping away every month. Our free 30-day billing review shows you exactly what's being denied, why, and how much of it is winnable. No cost, no obligation. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can learn is how much money is sitting in denials you didn't know you could recover.