Built by someone who lives it
DermEstimator was created by Juhi Mirchandani, a dermatology practice administrator with over 8 years in healthcare. After watching front desk staff hand patients wildly inaccurate cost estimates — and dealing with the billing disputes and patient distrust that followed — she built the tool her own practice needed.
The front desk shouldn't need a billing degree
Every day, front desk staff at dermatology practices face the same impossible question: "What will this cost me?" The honest answer requires understanding the patient's deductible balance, their co-insurance percentage, the practice's contracted rates with that specific payer, and how Medicare's multiple procedure rules apply when more than one procedure is planned. Most front desk staff have none of this information in one place — and no tool to pull it together in under a minute.
The No Surprises Act changed the stakes. The law now requires healthcare providers to give uninsured and self-pay patients a written Good Faith Estimate (GFE) before scheduled services — and extends similar protections to insured patients who request one. Practices that can't produce accurate estimates aren't just losing patient trust; they're creating compliance exposure every time a patient walks out with a guess instead of a number.
The existing workarounds — aging Excel sheets, calling the billing department mid-check-in, asking patients to figure it out through their insurance portal — all fail in the same way. They're slow, inconsistent, and often wrong. A spreadsheet that was accurate six months ago may be missing updated contracted rates. A billing department call that takes five minutes creates a line at check-in. And asking patients to "check with their insurance" is exactly the kind of non-answer that erodes the trust practices spend years building.
Dermatology has unique billing complexity
Dermatology is one of the most CPT-code-dense specialties in medicine. Mohs surgery alone can involve 5–6 codes per visit: the first stage, additional stages, tissue processing add-ons, repair codes, and pathology. Multiple procedure rule reductions apply differently to primary versus add-on codes — and getting that wrong, in either direction, means either undercharging patients or giving them a surprise bill larger than expected. Biopsy and destruction sequences, cosmetic versus medical distinctions, and locality-based Medicare reimbursement rates that vary by over 30% between rural and urban areas make accurate estimating nearly impossible without specialty-specific tooling. Generic medical billing calculators don't understand dermatology's code structure. Spreadsheets maintained by practices are usually months out of date. Neither option handles the 2026 MPFS updates automatically. DermEstimator was built specifically for this complexity — and nothing else.
What we built
DermEstimator runs on the official 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS), automatically applies multiple procedure payment rules, handles Mohs add-on codes (17312, 17314), and generates NSA-compliant Good Faith Estimates — all from the front desk, in under 60 seconds.
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525+ dermatology CPT codes preloaded — every biopsy, excision, Mohs stage, destruction, and E&M code used in dermatology practice.
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All 109 Medicare localities supported — GPCI-adjusted rates with ZIP code auto-detection ensure your practice uses the correct local fee schedule.
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Good Faith Estimate generation included — NSA-compliant GFEs generated in one click, pre-populated from the estimate. No re-entry, no template hunting.
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Custom payer rate support — store your contracted rates as a percentage of MPFS or upload a flat-dollar CSV fee schedule for any payer.
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Per-seat pricing — practices pay only for the users they need. No per-estimate fees, no usage caps, no long-term contracts.
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Questions, feedback, or partnership inquiries: support@dermestimator.com