If you run a billing and coding operation, you already know that denied claims are expensive. What many revenue cycle leaders underestimate is how much of that expense traces directly back to provider data that was wrong before the claim was ever submitted.
The number that tends to get people’s attention: U.S. providers lose an estimated $125 billion annually to poor billing practices, including denied claims, underpayments, and administrative rework. That figure, documented by Aptarro’s 2025/2026 medical billing statistics compendium, reflects a system-wide pattern of upstream data failures cascading into downstream revenue loss. And billing and coding firms sit at the intersection of every one of those failures.