Answers / Questions to ask

10 questions to ask an IDR filing service

Every vendor in this market will tell you they win. Most of them do, because providers win 85.8 percent of decided federal disputes, so a high win rate is the baseline, not a differentiator. The useful information lives in the operational details, and the way to get it is to ask the same ten questions of every service you talk to, including Lido IDR, and compare the answers side by side. Here is the list, with what a good answer sounds like.

1. How do you charge, exactly? There are two models: a flat fee per arbitration, or contingency at 15 to 25 percent of the recovery. If the answer is contingency, make them define recovery in writing: it should mean dollars collected above the payer's initial payment, nothing broader. Ask whether the fee also applies to money collected in open negotiation before a dispute is filed. The full comparison is in our pricing guide.
2. Who keeps the award, and where does the payer send it? Payment should flow from the payer to your group directly, with the service billing its fee separately. Be cautious with any arrangement where awards land in the vendor's account first. Under a flat fee model, every dollar of the award is yours; make the contingency vendor show you the equivalent flow.
3. What is your batching strategy? Claims against the same payer for the same or similar services within a 30 business day window can be combined into one dispute. Batching spreads the fixed fees and is what makes small claims worth arbitrating. A good answer describes how they track accumulation windows across your book and when they choose not to batch. A bad answer is a blank look.
4. Can you show win rate evidence at the dispute level? Ask for their record against the published baseline: 85.8 percent of decided federal disputes go to the provider. Any number they claim should come with how it was computed, and you can sanity-check specialty and state benchmarks yourself against the public record at idrexplorer.com.
5. Have you filed for my specialty? Evidence packets are specialty-specific: what persuades an arbiter on an emergency medicine claim differs from an anesthesia, radiology, or surgical claim. Ask for dispute counts and outcomes in your specialty, not logos.
6. Do we get portal access and live status visibility? You should be able to see every dispute: stage, deadlines, offers, and decisions. A service that reports only quarterly summaries is asking you to audit nothing.
7. What happens if you miss a deadline? The windows are unforgiving: the open negotiation notice within 30 business days, 4 business days to initiate after negotiation ends. A missed window kills the claim. Ask what the service owes you when the miss is theirs, and get it in the contract.
8. What reporting do we get? Per-dispute outcomes, award versus the qualifying payment amount, payer behavior patterns, and aging on unpaid awards. This data is yours; the service is generating it with your claims.
9. What is the contract term, and how do we leave? Prefer month to month or annual with a clean exit over multi-year lock-in. Ask who finishes the disputes in flight when you leave and whether fees change on them. Lock-in is how weak services keep clients that good filing would have kept.
10. Who pays the fees when we lose? Every dispute carries a $15 federal administrative fee per party, and the losing party's certified IDR entity fee is kept while the winner's is refunded. Ask who fronts these, who absorbs them on a loss, and how refunds are tracked back to you.

What the answers tell you

Fee structure and award flow (questions 1 and 2) tell you whose side the economics are on. Batching, specialty experience, and evidence (3 through 5) tell you whether they can do the work. Visibility, deadlines, and reporting (6 through 8) tell you whether you can verify it. Term and fee handling (9 and 10) tell you what happens when something goes wrong. If you are still deciding whether to hire anyone, read DIY federal IDR vs a filing service first, and confirm eligibility with who can use federal IDR.