By Roshan Patel, Founder & CEO
For most of my life, medical billing has been a pain. I grew up helping my provider parents with denials, decoding mysterious payer language, and waiting on hold endlessly. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it taught me something early on: the people doing this work care deeply, and the system often makes their jobs harder than they need to be.
When I started Arrow, those memories guided me. I kept meeting billers and practice owners who were facing the same challenges I saw years ago: confusing denials, scattered and changing payer rules, slow processes, and workflows that depend on digging through PDFs or relying on tribal knowledge. Even small questions could stall payments by days.
As we dug deeper, the scale of the problem became clearer. In 2023 alone, providers spent $25.7 billion fighting claim denials, and yet 70% of those denials were ultimately overturned. The issue isn’t that denials are unwinnable. It’s that billers are overwhelmed and under-resourced.
I truly believe that clarity is one of the most powerful gifts we can give. Sometimes, you don’t need a full platform or integrations. You just need quick, accurate answers to keep moving.
That’s why we built OpenRCM.
OpenRCM is a free, HIPAA-safe assistant that helps billers get instant guidance on the everyday questions that slow them down. No patient data, no setup, no pressure, just a simple way to find answers in seconds, trained on billions of claims.
You can ask things like:
• What does denial code CO-97 mean, and how do I fix it?
• Can I bill 97110 and 97140 together for Medicare?
• Draft an appeal letter for a missing-modifier denial.
• Does Cigna require prior auth for CPT 73721?
• Is ICD-10 M25.561 compatible with CPT 99203?
• What’s the difference between a clearinghouse rejection and a payer denial?
For many teams, these questions add up. They interrupt workflows, pile up in Slack channels or email threads, and turn small tasks into big ones. OpenRCM won’t solve the entire revenue cycle — that’s what Arrow is for — but it can take some of the daily friction away.
We also built OpenRCM this way on purpose. It doesn’t use PHI. It doesn’t access your EHR. It’s safe to try, safe to share, and hopefully a useful companion for billers who want clarity without complexity.
My hope is that this tool makes someone’s day a little easier: a biller who’s stuck on a denial, a new hire trying to learn coding rules, a team that needs quick references without digging through documents. And if it helps more practices get comfortable with AI in billing, that’s a meaningful step too.
This is just the beginning for us. We’ll keep improving OpenRCM, adding code intelligence, payer policy lookups, and better ways for teams to share knowledge. And when a team is ready for deeper automation — managing denials, follow-ups, accelerating A/R — Arrow will be there.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way. And thank you to the billers who do the work most people never see. I hope OpenRCM gives you back even a little bit of the time and clarity you deserve.
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