NORTHAMPTON — From its perch near the entrance of Village Hill Northampton, a rapidly-growing company that serves the home care and hospice industry has expanded its reach into Europe.
Fazzi Associates, which bills itself as the largest outsourced coding company serving home health care and hospice agencies in the United States, has opened an international location in Limerick, Ireland.
Fazzi opened the new office to provide round-the-clock coverage to its customers. The company said in a press release it will also begin serving international health care providers and payers from this new location.
Fazzi, founded by Robert Fazzi in 1978, has provided outsourced coding services to home care and hospice since 2009. The company has experienced annual growth every year since then thanks to a trend in the health care industry of outsourcing medical billing coding.
The company also operates locations in India to ensure 24-hour coverage and have access to coding supervisors.
The addition of this new office in Limerick provides even greater capacity needed for increased demand, the company said in a press release. That demand is expected to grow as the percentage of agencies larger than $500,000 that are outsourcing has more than tripled since 2014 to about 29 percent.
“In addition to increasing our ability to serve our customers on a 365/24/7 basis; by operating out of multiple locations, we provide business continuity and disaster recovery services for the mission critical coding process to our clients,” Fazzi said in a press release.
He said the industry is realizing that this coverage is of growing importance due to things like climate change, natural disasters, terrorism, and cyber security risks.
Fazzi Associates also intends to use its new Ireland operations to provide medical coding services to hospitals, doctors, home care providers, health care centers, health insurers and governmental health care entities across the globe.
In a 2012 interview with the Gazette, before his company moved to a new office building at Village Hill from cramped quarters in the Potpourri Plaza on King Street, Fazzi predicted his firm would continue the rapid growth it had been experiencing at the time.
Today, the company employs 150 people — 50 at its Northampton headquarters, 20 in Ireland and the rest working remotely from across the United States.
The company says it is the either the largest or second largest — to Smith College — with more than 100,000 patient satisfaction survey companies.
Patients also benefit when accurately processed medical codes enable agencies to collect more money and invest it back into their services, or when research studies show ways agencies can keep patients out of the hospital, Fazzi said.
