New Xtend Healthcare Service Center Pushes Company’s Hendersonville Employees over 600

Xtend Healthcare, the nation’s fastest growing healthcare revenue cycle management company, plans to open a new call center in Hendersonville that will employ approximately 275 people.

The service center, which is scheduled to open during the first two weeks of June, increases the number of the company’s call center employees in Hendersonville to more than 600.

Xtend currently maintains a center with 300 seats at its Hendersonville corporate headquarters and opened a nearby annex call center May 2013 with another 80 employees. The company also opened a 300-seat Antioch service center in January.

The new Hendersonville center, located on Main Street, will specialize in answering patients’ questions about their hospital bills along with resolving patient balances.

“As we work to staff our new center to meet our growing client demand, we are accepting applications immediately for customer service representatives,” said Scott Swonger, Assistant Vice President, who will oversee the service center’s operations.

Swonger, a Hendersonville resident with more than 30 years of call center experience, emphasized that the center’s staff are not mere bill collectors. Rather, he said, “Our CSRs are trained in helping both patients and hospitals resolve billing issues that may involve a variety of different payers.”

Revenue cycle management firms such as Xtend work to be an extension of hospitals’ business offices, helping them navigate an extremely complex reimbursement environment that includes private insurance and public payers as well as individual patients. “With the Affordable Care Act and higher co-payment balances for many patients, the challenges that hospital business offices face today are rapidly growing even more complicated, and many lack the added expertise, technology and cybersecurity they need to manage their receivables in a timely and efficient way,” Swonger said. “Xtend helps to bridge that gap.”

Xtend’s local roots go back more than two decades, when Howard Kirshner and Hendersonville resident Tom O’Neill established ARS, one of the first comprehensive providers of revenue cycle services. Since they founded Xtend Healthcare in 2009, the company has rapidly grown from 35 employees to more than 800. Providing customer service, insurance billing and follow-up, Xtend today serves more than 200 hospitals and health systems encompassing all 50 states.

“To meet the demand for our services, we have hired 200 employees in just the past 90 days, and we will hire another 200 employees in the next 90 days,” Swonger said.

Almost all of the company’s nearly 800 employees are based in the Nashville area. “We made a conscious decision to stay in Sumner County,” said O’Neill, Xtend’s CEO, “because of the quality of the workforce and the strong work ethic here. Because the clients we serve are spread across the United States, many Hendersonville residents don’t realize we’re here, but we have quietly become one of the city’s large employers. This is the place we are very proud to call home.

“We are also proud that 100 percent of our call center staff are based here in the United States.”

Xtend Healthcare provides a full range of revenue cycle management services to clients, including onsite accelerated recovery programs, extended business office services, consultation services, HIM consulting and coding services, ICD-10 assessment and education, and self-pay services. The company serves clients of all types and sizes, from critical-access hospitals to those with more than 2,000 beds, and from individual facilities to multi-hospital health systems.