HEALTH CARE CONSULTING COMPANY LOCATES HERE

Chafin & Associates, a national health care consulting company, has relocated from Memphis to Cape Girardeau.

The seven-year-old firm provides private practice physicians with various management services. This includes marketing and business planning, collection systems, insurance claims preparation, personnel selection and evaluation, patient education programs and information on health maintenance organization and preferred provider organizations.

The firm also assists with current procedure terminology and international classification of diseases coding and relative value system derived fee schedules.

Founder W. Fred Chafin also presents seminars nationwide on medical insurance, Medicare, coding and fee collection.

He and his wife, Elizabeth, staff the local office, located at 114 Silver Springs Rd. Suite 114.

"Our main area of service is on-site consulting on practice management for physicians," Chafin said. He said the more popular seminars cover medical fee collection and specialty coding for billing.

"The move to Cape Girardeau was due to geography," he said. "It is located in the center of our trade area." It reaches through Southeast Missouri, Western Kentucky, Southern Illinois and into St. Louis.

Chafin has been leading seminars for health care providers since 1979, averaging 40 annually. For 14 years he headed a regional collection agency for hospitals and physicians in the Southeast.