A New Jersey ambulance company claims that a Chappaqua billing service has failed to collect more than $5.6 million in payments for its emergency services.
NJ Mobile Healthcare LLC of Mahwah, New Jersey accused Digitech Computer LLC of breach of contract in a complaint filed Nov. 8 in Westchester Supreme Court.
“Digitech purported to provide ambulance billing and related services,” the complaint states, “but was woefully inadequate in doing so.”
Digitech founder and CEO Mark Schiowitz did not respond to a voicemail message asking for his side of the story.
He founded the company in 1984 as a business technology consulting firm, according to its website, and quickly narrowed its focus to medical transportation software. He credits his interest in emergency services to his father, who ran two ambulance companies.
Digitech does billing and collections for ambulance services that handle as few as 1,000 and as many as 600,000 transports, the website states.
It boasts that its Ambulance Commander technology maximizes clients’ revenues and enables ambulance services to “focus on what they do best: serving patients.”
“EMS billing is all we do,” it stated in a 2020 press release. “We know EMS.”
NJ Mobile says on its website that it has been providing basic life support and ambulance services in northern New Jersey since 2014.
In 2017, it contracted with Advanced Data Processing Inc. to handle billing. R1 RCM Inc. acquired ADP in 2018, according to the complaint, and continued to handle the contract.
In 2020, Sarnova, a Dublin, Ohio healthcare company specializing in emergency services enterprises, acquired R1 RCM and Digitech and merged the competitors under the Digitech name. The business operates at the former Reader’s Digest campus at Chappaqua Crossing.
The merger more than doubled Digitech’s customer base, according to a press release. Schiowitz continued to lead the company and retained an interest in the business.
NJ Mobile claims that Digitech assumed control of the billing contract and that performance “fell off drastically.”
The ambulance company says it repeatedly complained, and then in November 2021 Digitech unilaterally terminated the deal and stopped performing all services.
NJ Mobile claims that Digitech owes it $5,620,558.
It is represented by Manhattan attorney J. Roberto Cardenas.
