Thriving Practice with Tracy Cherpeski
Jul 8, 2026 · 43 min · 11 segments
Most private practice owners have a feeling they're not being paid what they're owed by insurance payers — but very few can prove it. In this episode, Tracy Cherpeski talks with Brett Spark of Aroris…
Brett SparkGuest
Tracy CherpeskiHost
And I'm curious when you started to realize that this was more of a systemic issue than kind of like a one-off situation.
Did you start seeing that more in the private practice side or did you also see that in the larger system?
Our focus has been mainly on the private practice side of the world, not to say that that's not happening.
Where we started to see it, you know, as I mentioned, we started our business as a service-focused organization where we could support private practices with their negotiations and kind of that... that just repetition would bring value to these practices.
Them doing it once a year, once every five years, and in some cases, or never at all, to us doing hundreds of negotiations a year would bring value to that relationship.
But where we start every negotiation when we started the business was by getting every contract, by reading the contract, painfully so, reading through the details of the contracts, understanding what was valuable to that practice or what they build, where they were doing it, and what the reimbursement was on a per-payer basis.
And that's really when we dug into that data and we were creating some of that data by reading some of those contracts, we were seeing, oh, not only is there maybe an opportunity on the negotiation side where we have some more market information than we historically have had, But also, as we look at what you've billed over the last year and what you've been paid, there's some discrepancies in what you're being paid per what the contract says.
And I think that all was because of where we started with the relationship, painfully reading these agreements.
That was us reading 60 pages of every different payer agreement and formulating what that reimbursement was.
But that aha moment came based on the visibility that we were creating on the front end of the relationship.
Do you think that practitioners know sometimes that they're getting the short end of the stick?
I think every one of our clients has felt like they were getting underpaid or there was misalignment versus market, um, for how they were being paid from a payer perspective.
And to some degree, that's just the narrative that's been written in health care all over that.
What they don't have is visibility to the degree or to the granular level that you would expect.
to be able to make decisions on what you're asking for or how you're tracking what's going on.
And I think that's where we were able to bring to light a lot of that within our client base.
Part of that is because when we sign a client, we ask them to provide their contracts online.
And I'm curious when you started to realize that this was more of a systemic issue than kind of like a one-off situation.
Did you start seeing that more in the private practice side or did you also see that in the larger system?
Our focus has been mainly on the private practice side of the world, not to say that that's not happening.
Where we started to see it, you know, as I mentioned, we started our business as a service-focused organization where we could support private practices with their negotiations and kind of that... that just repetition would bring value to these practices.
Them doing it once a year, once every five years, and in some cases, or never at all, to us doing hundreds of negotiations a year would bring value to that relationship.
But where we start every negotiation when we started the business was by getting every contract, by reading the contract, painfully so, reading through the details of the contracts, understanding what was valuable to that practice or what they build, where they were doing it, and what the reimbursement was on a per-payer basis.
And that's really when we dug into that data and we were creating some of that data by reading some of those contracts, we were seeing, oh, not only is there maybe an opportunity on the negotiation side where we have some more market information than we historically have had, But also, as we look at what you've billed over the last year and what you've been paid, there's some discrepancies in what you're being paid per what the contract says.
And I think that all was because of where we started with the relationship, painfully reading these agreements.
That was us reading 60 pages of every different payer agreement and formulating what that reimbursement was.
But that aha moment came based on the visibility that we were creating on the front end of the relationship.
Do you think that practitioners know sometimes that they're getting the short end of the stick?
I think every one of our clients has felt like they were getting underpaid or there was misalignment versus market, um, for how they were being paid from a payer perspective.
And to some degree, that's just the narrative that's been written in health care all over that.
What they don't have is visibility to the degree or to the granular level that you would expect.
to be able to make decisions on what you're asking for or how you're tracking what's going on.
And I think that's where we were able to bring to light a lot of that within our client base.
Part of that is because when we sign a client, we ask them to provide their contracts online.
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