Online Medical Billing
Online Medical Billing Inquiry displays specific patient information for quick and easy look-up. Aging is done automatically and sorted by patient, insurance plan, or both.
Transactions are grouped by date-of- service to include all charges, payments, write-offs and adjustments, or refunds pertaining to a specific claim. These encounters or “sequences” are alternately shaded to make identifying them easier. Information such as the filed date display in this area. This screen also displays the current insurance plan (based on current date), the patient’s co-pay amount, and the Remarks area from the patient’s detail screen. The order of encounters can be changed from ascending to descending so that the most recent encounters display first. In the case of patients in a family billing account, the Account button can be checked to show all family members in the encounter display. The Balance and Total columns in the encounter list are also helpful in that the Balance column displays the running balance of the specific encounter, while the Total column shows the running balance for the entire account.
While viewing patient transactions, you can “drill down” to view specific payment details by simply double-clicking a payment line. This opens the Payment Details screen that shows the payment and the amount of that payment applied to each charge line in the transaction. From this screen, you can make modifications to how much of the payment is applied to each individual charge line.
The Payments Only icon displays a screen (right) that reports all of the payments , write-offs, and /or adjustments on a patient’s account. The list can be sorted by any of the column headings. The Bill column lists all patient responsible items separate from insurance responsible items, while the Posting column sorts the list in descending date order. The Description column groups all like types of procedures together, such as adjustments, payments, and then write- offs. The Amount column sorts in either ascending or descending order.
MicroMD gives you the choice of sending patients a bill or a statement. What’s the difference? A bill will show all patient-responsible amounts on a patient’s account, while the statement reflects these but also the amounts that are insurance pending. There are advantages to both. While the statement gives more detail and a look at the “big picture”, the bill is simpler and less confusing. The bill is also more economical for postage costs since a bill will print only if a patient has a patient-responsible amount due. If everything
is pending with the insurance companies, no bill will print! A practice default can be established to print either a bill or a statement. In addition, a patient-by-patient decision can be selected so that when printing patient statement/bills. The system prints them both at one time and makes the decision of who gets a statement and who gets a bill?
Family billing can also be set up to allow one statement to be sent to a household -with all family members itemized.
Outsource Patient Statements: A practice can upload their monthly patient statements to Express Bill, a third-party vendor, that supplies the statement form (on the right) and the postage and mails the patient statements for the practice. MicroMD can be set up to implement this feature. In-house printing of patient statements can be done on a laser printer and in a format that allows window envelopes to be used to eliminate the need for labels. User-defined dunning messages can be set up to automatically print on the patient’s statement depending on the aging date of the account. Pre-collection can be enabled to automatically generate a user-defined collection letter instead of continuing to send another ignored statement.
Direct Electronic Claims: The screen on the left illustrates how easy it is to submit claims directly
to the insurance companies. All claims ready to be submitted are displayed for each form type-such as Medicare, Anthem, Medical Mutual, etc. Claims can be edited at this point to change diagnoses, dates, add documentation, etc. as illustrated in the screen below. The Electronic Online Medical Billing module also allows the operator to select certain patient claims to send or to view claims that are ready to be processed, claims that have already been processed, or claims that have been put on hold.
A summary report authenticates all claims and insures there are no mistakes in the claims batch that would cause rejections (right). After the claims are batched, the Send Claims icon launches the communications program (Hyper Access) that uploads the claims to the insurance company and then downloads the confirmation report. The average time to send 100 claims and receive the confirmation report for most practices is under six minutes.