Episource — Profile & Assessment

What it does

Episource publishes these service lines: Risk adjustment chart retrieval and coding (historically), now marketed under Optum's risk-adjustment operations, Historically: risk adjustment chart review, HEDIS abstraction, medical record retrieval for Medicare Advantage plans, Risk adjustment coding, medical record retrieval and review for HCC/risk-adjustment purposes (per historical Episource positioning and not detailed on redirected Optum page this session). Everything above is drawn from the 7 public sources cited at the foot of this page. Fields the company does not publish are marked as unpublished below rather than estimated.

Evaluation criteria

Profile notes

What to confirm before you sign

Episource publishes 4 of the 8 fields in the Content Hub rubric. Across all 318 vendors profiled in the Content Hub, the median is 5 of 8. The gaps below are not marks against the vendor — most of this industry quotes on request. They are simply the questions you still have to ask, and the answers are worth getting in writing before a file changes hands.

1. How do you charge — per page, per file, per hour, or per seat?
   Get the unit before you scope a pilot. A per-hour or per-seat quote and a per-page quote behave very differently once a file runs past 1,000 pages.
   Pricing model58% of all profiled vendors leave this unpublishedOurs: flat per page, no seats, no subscription
2. What does a real 1,000-page file cost, all in?
   Ask for a worked example rather than a rate card. Duplicate pages, rush fees and monthly minimums are where the quoted rate and the final invoice separate.
   Indicative cost83% of all profiled vendors leave this unpublishedOurs: 10¢ a page, duplicates free
3. What is the turnaround on a 1,000-page file, and is that a median or a best case?
   Ask what the clock starts from — receipt, or the point the file clears intake — and what the same number looks like in your busiest week.
   Typical turnaround76% of all profiled vendors leave this unpublishedOurs: same day on the self-service plan
4. What formats does the deliverable come in, and do the citations survive export?
   Ask to see an exported file rather than a screen share. A citation that works inside the vendor's viewer and dies in Word is not a citation you can file.
   Export formats92% of all profiled vendors leave this unpublishedOurs: DOCX or HTML, every citation stays a live link
5. Where do the records live, and who signs the BAA?
   Protected health information is going to leave your office. Ask which entity holds it, in which country, and who is on the hook if it leaks.
   Every vendorOurs: HIPAA-eligible cloud under our own BAA
6. Is my data used to train a model?
   Ask for the answer in the contract rather than the sales call, and check whether it also binds their subprocessors.
   Every vendorOurs: never trains a model