Sioux Falls entrepreneur strikes gold with medical payment business

A Sioux Falls entrepreneur is striking gold with her medical payment processing business, and a long friendship is playing a crucial role in the growth ahead.

BJ Dvorak, a long-time veteran of the field, founded eProvider Solutions in 2005. Her business is the lubrication in the machinery that gets your hospital bill paid. The business serves as a clearinghouse for medical payments, connecting health care providers such as hospitals with payers such as insurance companies. 

Last year eProvider Solutions processed $3.66 billion in claims. With some large new customers coming on board, Dvorak is on track to double that business in the near future, she said.

"I love what I do, and I love doing what I do," she said.

To meet growing demand, Dvorak is expanding her 15-employee workforce and has recently added a new partnership, one that sprung from a long friendship.

Dvorak recently partnered with Omaha, Nebraska-based data warehouse and analytics company H4 Technology. H4T helps analyze the kind of data Dvorak handles and present it in an easy to understand way. The company was looking to expand into South Dakota and into a national client base. 

Tony Tiefenthaler knew Dvorak for decades from his years of work at Avera and Sanford. When he joined H4T in February, Dvorak was one of his first sales calls.

"I saw an opportunity to work with BJ because she's a claim clearinghouse," said Tiefenthaler, H4T strategic account representative. "One of her clients is in Avera, but she's been in the business since 1990, and I thought there was a lot of synergy between what she does and what we do."

Dvorak got into the field in 1990, opening Medical Data Insurance Processing Inc., more commonly known as MDIP, and growing it until the company was purchased in 2002. It was a long track record of providing a crucial bridge to transitioning health care from paper to electronic billing.

"It was a brand new industry," she said. "McKennan Hospital was our very first client."

The business works like this: You go to see your doctor. After your visit a bill, or claim, is generated for your visit and it's sent to Dvorak. She specializes in knowing all the nit-picky details of all the payers who eventually pay the claim. She passes on the claim to the payer, such as an insurance company. They process the claim and send it back for payment. 

H4T serves as a dashboard for the entire process. It monitors and predicts how quickly bills are getting paid, and if they're not getting paid, provides the information needed to figure out why and what can be done about it. The smoother the process, the less hassle it is for everyone involved, including you, the patient.

"We really expect this will be a fabulous thing for our clients," Dvorak said.