About MCA

Tara Hardwick, President and founder of MCA, was introduced to the EMS industry when asked to write the first ambulance software with electronic billing capabilities in 1986. Her background involved monitoring employee medical insurance benefits and led to a position as a Computer Systems Engineer at a major West Virginia based company.

MCA was established in 1986, when privately-owned ambulance services were just beginning operations in our region and volunteer agencies were not billing. After seeing the resources provided to the private companies, volunteer agencies became interested in billing. MCA was instrumental in helping volunteer squads through the transition to charging for their services. Despite the volunteer’s fears, the public supported the change. New equipment was purchased, new buildings were built and volunteers were eventually paid for their time. It was a win-win situation. As a result, Kentucky Medicaid asked us to develop a mutual aid system for the state, and so, MCA was born.

Since then, Tara has been instrumental in assisting many departments to bill for the very first time. Among her many contributions, she served on the state’s Medicaid task force and assisted in the development of the national list of condition codes and modifiers. She has also been involved in the testing and debugging of insurance carrier’s systems when format or coding changes were required.