How Protego Can Help Prevent Denials Before They Occur – And Why They Built It on Vim Connect

$25 billion.

That’s what U.S. providers spend every year fighting denied claims. Not because the services weren’t medically necessary. Not because the documentation was missing. Because payer rules are fragmented across portals, PDFs, contracts, and institutional memory – and they’re almost never surfaced at the moment a decision is being made. The result is a problem everyone can describe but no one has solved cleanly: predictable, preventable denials that drain revenue and burn out staff. Protego decided to move upstream.

The Insight: Denials Are a Timing Problem

“Most denials aren’t clinical failures – they’re information failures,” says Corey Feldman, CEO of Protego. “The payer rule that would have prevented the denial existed. It just wasn’t visible when the claim was being built.” Protego’s engine is designed to interpret payer-specific requirements and surfaces relevant guidance before submission – flagging the claims most likely to be denied while there’s still time to fix them. When denials do happen, it is designed to help streamline  the appeal process with the supporting evidence already assembled. 

Why Build on Vim Connect?

For Protego, the decision came down to one question: where does this solution need to live? A standalone portal means another tab, another login, another tool clinicians and billers won’t open mid-workflow. The value of denial prevention is lessened if it doesn’t show up at the point of care. “Vim shares our vision for front-end efficiency,” Corey says. “But what made it a clear choice was the reach — thousands of practices across multiple EHRs, through a single integration. We didn’t want to rebuild every system.” With Vim Connect, Protego built once and deployed across Vim’s entire EHR footprint. As Vim expands to new systems, Protego’s coverage can expand as Vim adds new systems, without requiring additional builds, or renegotiated contracts in many cases. For Protego’s engineering team, the experience matched the promise; according to Corey “The SDK worked out of the box. The Vim team was hands-on when we hit edge cases, and the turnaround on troubleshooting was fast. For a healthcare integration, that’s unusual.”

What’s Next

Protego is now live in the Vim Application Marketplace and focused on driving adoption across provider groups most burdened by denials, particularly in post-acute and specialty care where payer complexity is highest. “We’re measuring this by denial rates, not downloads,” Corey says. “The metric that matters is: did fewer claims come back rejected? Everything else follows from that.”

Denials aren’t going away. But where you fight them is changing.

Protego is moving the intervention point from after-the-fact appeals to in-workflow prevention. Vim Connect is the infrastructure that puts it in front of the right people at the right time.

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