Monday, May 19, 2008

Medical Billing Software


Billing software is an application that can make the billing process a breeze at any medical office. Billing software and its use guarantees the practice proficient billing practices with less manual labor involved in handling the process of billing. In fact, software can help the office keep organized and make tax time a hassle free time for the office that takes advantage of such an application.

There are numerous software applications designed for the specific needs of the community. Billing software applications are engineered for family practitioners, clinics, billing service specialists, hospitals, psychologists, physical therapy offices, chiropractic offices, dental practices, and there are even medical software applications suitable for equipment companies. The software applications that have been engineered for medical office management are diverse, providing users with a variety of functions as well. Current software allows users to bill patients, report overdue bills to collection agencies; make patient appointments; handle scheduling; easily submit claims to insurance companies and software serves as an electronic database of patients records.

Clearly, software is something no practice or office should be without. The functionality of the program alone makes the software an imperative tool in every medical office. Current medical billing software applications have been designed to meet with the standards imposed by HIPPA and the fact that any claims made to insurance companies are electronic and not paper means that the office will receive payment that much faster.

There are numerous medical billing software applications designed for the specific needs of the medical community. Billing software applications are engineered for family practitioners, medical clinics, medical billing service specialists, hospitals, psychologists, physical therapy offices, chiropractic offices, dental practices, and there are even medical billing software applications suitable for medical equipment companies. The software applications that have been engineered for office management are diverse, providing users with a variety of functions as well. Current software allows users to bill patients, report overdue bills to collection agencies; make patient appointments; handle scheduling; easily submit claims to insurance companies and billing software serves as an electronic database of patients records.

Medical billing software will undoubtedly help you in your quest to establish more organized business practices. Most doctors and medical billing professionals find that medical billing software helps them execute their billing in a more organized and efficient way. No longer will you have files and piles of information that could be better organized. Your medical billing software will help you index information in a better manner so that you can pull up bills for clients, send them out in an efficient amount of time, and simply keep good records.

Medical Billing Management is an informative Medical Billing site that looks into all aspects of Medical Billing from Software to Management. To find out more visit Medical Billing

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Monday, March 17, 2008

VoIP Billing Software

VoIP is an acronym for Voice over IP (Internet Protocol), or in more common terms, phone service over the Internet. Basically, it's a set of common Internet standards that allows a user's voice to be converted into small packs of digital data which can then be sent over computer networks. At the receiving end, VoIP computers reassemble the data packets back into a conventional audio signal that can be heard just as if on a regular telephone line. This is an online scheme that has been bubbling around the Internet community for the past few years. A major advantage of VoIP is that it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone services.

There is VoIP billing software also that handles billing and other processes. This software can be used by all kinds of businesses. It helps in keeping track of customers, the bills to be sent to them and other such details through a protocol. This software has features like broadband phone, PC to phone, wholesale (termination), traffic exchange, international callback and prepaid calling cards that meet your VOIP business needs.

VoIP billing is tightly integrated with popular gateways, gatekeepers, proxies and soft switches from vendors like Quintum, Cisco, Sylantro, Veraz, Nextone, IPtel, Mera, and other compliant devices. Most telephony billing systems currently used today are based on non-IP standards, making them not equipped to handle or accurately bill for IP services; hence, VoIP billing rose to prominence. The reasons why most of the service providers and enterprises chose the VoIP billing software to expand their business is that it integrates the core functions like authentication, authorization, and accounting with vital functions that facilitate the effective management of all billing-related processes, like customers, services, finance, service distribution, reporting, traffic partners, and user rights.

VoIP billing software allows service providers and enterprises to expand their business by including cost-effective VoIP services in their offerings. It also enables the pre-paid or post-paid billing options for call usage and provides the ability to offer flexible call plans.

VoIP Billing Software provides detailed information on Billing Software, VoIP Billing Software, Chiropractic Billing Software, Free Billing Software and more. VoIP Billing Software is affiliated with HIPAA Complaint Medical Billing Software

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Invoicera: An Invoice Billing Management and Tracking Software

Are you looking for a payment tracking and invoice software which is simple and powerful? Are you spending too much time entering bills, invoices, purchase order and other data that reoccur periodically?

Invoicera (Invoice Software) has the solution.

Invoicera is professional billing & invoicing software for small to medium businesses invoicing. Invoicera is an invoice billing software which allows you to manage and track your invoicing data. With this flexible billing & invoicing software, you can create invoice, email invoice as a file and manage customer accounts and bills. It is a highly integrated Invoice Software which makes invoicing easy and automatic. The Invoice Billing software allows you to easily manage customers, invoices and payments. Invoicera is a highly integrated Invoice Software which includes a user friendly interface and several easy to use tools to track your payments and make your invoice billing better. The software is simple, easy to learn and allows you to create detailed invoices with ease. It keeps a track of your customer payments, simplifies your bookkeeping and print or email your invoice or quotes. Invoicera includes several easy to use tools to help you manage your professional business and invoicing better. It is an online invoicing software which assists you in invoice tracking and invoice management

Invoicera creates professional invoices automatically. You can print these invoices or save them to a file that you can email. Invoicera is a highly affordable and easy to learn invoice program. Instant reports, track of monthly sales, customer payments, outstanding invoices and tax reports.

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http://www.invoicera.com/

Invoicera is an Online Invoicing Software for Invoicewhich provides invoice-billing-featuresInvoicera is the perfect invoicing software, invoice tracking software, invoice management software and invoice billing software

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Electronic Medical Billing Software and Service Compliance With Pre-Payment And Post-Payment Audits

Mistaken payments add up to an estimated $200 billion, exceeding 10% of national healthcare costs. Other Party Liability (OPL) alone, i.e., claims that should be paid by somebody else, make up $68 billion or 3.6% of national healthcare cost. The enormous size of potential savings due to improved claims processing continues to attract attention and resource focus. Insurance profitability experts believe that a payment scrutiny program can be as successful a profit-building strategy for insurance companies as raising premiums or adding members. A growing industry of outsourced technology and services to avoid mistaken payments is also symptomatic of a growing demand for such services. Some vendors cite cumulative payment savings as high as $3 billion.

However, avoiding mistaken payments is hard because of four-pronged constraints, namely, the volume of claims, the disparate and disconnected sources of relevant information, the resource-intensive manual processes needed to identify and investigate recovery opportunities, and regulatory requirements for timely payments.

To manage these difficulties, many payers adopted a two-phase-based “pay-and-refund” approach for payment minimization. The second phase of this approach is designed to correct any mistakes made during the first phase. Each of the phases can be further divided into two stages. Specifically, the initial phase splits into prepayment review and timely payment of valid items, while the final phase includes post-payment audits and refunds of items proven invalid during the audit.

Prepayment Review

Prepayment review typically proceeds in two stages, identification and confirmation. Potential overpayment identification requires cross-referencing multiple systems that manage provider enrollment, authorizations, recovery case management, and call centers for both insured and providers.

Overpayment confirmation uses Correct Coding Initiative (CCI), Local Medical Review Policies (LMRP), and other rules to categorize the potential overpayments into Contractual/Clinical, Eligibility, Coordination of Benefits, or Duplicate Payments. Overpayment confirmation typically includes tests for inter-claim, intra-claim, or cross claim inconsistencies, lifetime duplicates, date range duplicates, re-bundling, inappropriate modifier codes, wrong E&M crosswalk, upcoded or undercoded visit level, etc.

Prepayment review requires powerful database technology. Most of prepayment claim review process can be automated along with subsequent denial notice or explanation of benefits (EOB).

Post-Payment Audit

In contrast, post-payment audits tend to consume more resources during each one of the audit stages:

  1. Target identification Audit identification report shows total annual revenue and the degree of variance between the audit target and peers in the same specialty and geography. The product of the two numbers is proportional to the expected gain from the audit, essentially providing a natural audit ranking.
  2. Audit preparation A higher return to the payer is the key advantage of a carefully designed and executed post-payment audit. Audit preparation starts with a review of audit target selection, which is the result of provider profiling and variance reporting. This stage includes a list of claims paid in the past that are most likely to fall outside of standard distribution of the peer group.
  3. Audit execution The auditor requests and analyzes medical notes supporting the data reflected in the sample of paid claims produced at the audit preparation stage. The auditor’s objective is to establish the proportion of claims found unsupported by reviewed medical notes within the set of audited sample (percent of overpayment).
  4. Refund (and penalty) extrapolation The auditor extrapolates refund as the product of percent of overpayment and the total payments by the auditing insurance carrier for the past six years.
  5. Negotiation
  6. Settlement

Some stages, such as audit execution, negotiation, and settlement must be entirely manual, and may require highly skilled and experienced personnel. Other stages, such as verification of overpayment amount and currency, identification of overpayment reason, and audit prioritization, may be partially automated, using rule-based technology to identify procedure repetition, high payments per day, surge analysis, unusual modifiers, unusual procedure rates, geographic improbabilities, or 5/50 patterns. External resources might be added at this stage to consult provider watch lists, OIG sanctions databases, or high-risk address databases.

Summary

A full-scale implementation of payment scrutiny requires sophisticated processes to handle prepayment claim review and post-payment audits and uses advanced fraud detection technology. Prepayment claim reviews are less expensive than post-payment audits and therefore can be applied to every claim, while post-payment audits must be carefully targeted. A system to manage overpayment recovery process must include claim identification, its history, provider and insured information, medical notes, insured services call center notes, authorizations, etc. Without the ability to efficiently manage a large volume of recovery cases, the risk for errors or missed payment deadlines is high, resulting in missed recovery opportunities.

Yuval Lirov, PhD, author of "Practicing Profitability - Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinic and Chiropractic Office: Scheduling, SOAP Notes, Care Plans, Coding, Billing, Collections, and Audit Risk" (Affinity Billing) and "Mission Critical Systems Management" (Prentice Hall), inventor of patents in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Security, and CEO of Vericle.net - Distributed Billing and Practice Management Technologies. Yuval invites you to register to the next webinar on audit risk at BillingPrecision.com

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Monday, February 11, 2008

Improve Patient Loyalty With Integrated Electronic Medical Billing, Notes, And Scheduling Software

Patient Loyalty

Patient loyalty is key to continued practice success in terms of both recurring and new revenue. As patients keep returning to your practice, it maintains revenue stability and as patients refer their friends and family, your practice billing collections grow. In terms of profitability, new patient acquisition is by an order of magnitude more expensive than loyalty maintenance for an existing patient.

Time delay is a major problem of eroding patient loyalty. By the time you discover that you have a patient loyalty problem, it is typically too late to do anything about the patients who already left. Patients typical desert without saying “good bye,” and your only way to discover patient attrition is by observing lower collections and more free time on your appointment scheduler.

Frequent patient communication is the only effective way to reduce such time delay and increase the likelihood of timely loyalty problem identification and resolution. Such patient communications can revolve around any of the practice management components, starting with patient scheduling, to SOAP notes, to special health care literature, to medical billing, insurance payments, copays, and deductibles.

Patient Identification for Targeted Communications

It's convenient to view targeted communications from the patient visit perspective:

 

  • Patients due for scheduled appointment or owe you payments need a reminder.
  • Patients that recently had an appointment need results, interpretation, prescriptions, and follow up.
  • Patients with prescriptions that are about to expire may need to schedule a visit
  • Patients that have not had an appointment for long time need a reminder to schedule a checkup. A screening procedure schedule should be generated using specific combinations of procedures (CPT) and diagnoses (ICD) codes.
  • Patients with chronic conditions or permanent injuries need literature about recent progress in treating their conditions
  • Patients that have had a long series of appointments need progress reports
  • Patients that receive good progress reports need to be solicited for referrals
  • Patients with bad progress reports need special literature and special appointments
  • Patients waiting in reception area need access to custom information about their specific condition.

 

To generate such lists of patients, your systems must combine scheduling, medical notes, and billing data in a single database.

Patient Communications Venue

While traditional phone and conventional mail systems are still in use, Internet is the most obvious choice for communicating with patients. A custom, HIPAA-compliant patient portal is the least expensive way to allow your patients interact with their doctor outside the clinic at their convenience and privacy. Patients can

  • Review reminders and schedule appointments.
  • Review visit results.
  • Ask you clarifying questions.
  • Request prescriptions.
  • Read special literature and progress reports you sent them.
  • Send you referrals.
  • Review medical bills and pay invoices
  • Track their medical costs

 

Active patient loyalty management based on selective patient identification for targeted communications at the patient's convenience is one of the most effective way to improve practice profitability.

Yuval Lirov, PhD, author of "Practicing Profitability - Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinic and Chiropractic Office: Scheduling, SOAP Notes, Care Plans, Coding, Billing, Collections, and Audit Risk" (Affinity Billing) and "Mission Critical Systems Management" (Prentice Hall), inventor of patents in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Security, and CEO of Vericle.net - Distributed Billing and Practice Management Technologies. Yuval invites you to register to the next webinar on audit risk at BillingPrecision.com.

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Monday, January 28, 2008

Chiropractic Office Billing Software And Patient Relationship Management - 9 Criteria For Best SaaS

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pushes the limits of outsourcing and reduces the exorbitant costs of specialized practice management software. SaaS model is available for all aspects of chiropractic clinic management, including scheduling, billing, and SOAP note documentation, which are mission-critical for high quality health care, practice building, and regulatory compliance.

What is Software-as-a-Service?

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a logical step in the progression from build to buy to subscribe and a manifestation of a major software trend towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SaaS is the software industry term for delivery of software product and services over a network (typically the Internet) under subscription business model.

The increasing reliability of the Internet coupled with availability of completely integrated practice management and billing software, create supportive conditions to pay-as-you-go business model. SaaS liberates the users in two significant ways:

 

  1. SaaS requires no large upfront investment in hardware and software licenses on the part of the user
  2. SaaS shifts the onus of systems management from the user to the SaaS vendor, including
    1. Internet connectivity, bandwidth, and routers
    2. Servers for Web server software, email, firewalls
    3. Capacity management
    4. Redundancy management
    5. Application upgrade management

       

       

     

     

 

In financial management terms, SaaS proposition is equivalent to turning capital expense into operating expense, which translates into

 

  1. Better balance sheets
  2. Lower risk, especially during the period of rapid technology innovation on one hand and practice-building stages on the other hand

     

     

 

SaaS differs from Applications Service Providers (ASP) in two ways, namely, domain expertise and software development skills. While ASP vendors developed primarily hardware and systems expertise and offered foreign business applications, SaaS vendors are experts in the specific application domain.

SaaS Vendor Selection

For the manager of chiropractic clinic, the main challenge could be the integration of newer applications with the subscribed SaaS application. SaaS Integration Platforms (SIP) is a popular way to handle the integration challenge. A SIP, such as Vericle, offers a suite of integrated applications, such as Patient Relationship Management, Patient Scheduling, SOAP notes, and Billing.

Chiropractic clinic in search of SaaS vendor must focus on the following topics:

 

  1. Functionality: Does the application deliver required functionality?
  2. Training: Will the vendor provide sufficient application training?
  3. Third-Party Application Interface: Does the application work with existing applications already deployed in the office? What requirements must be satisfied if you decide to purchase another application later?
  4. Performance: How do you measure application performance? Are formal performance metrics available continuously?
  5. HIPAA Compliance: What controls are in place to enable access only on a "need to see" basis? Is every access instance logged using secure mechanism?
  6. Service Level Agreement: What minimum service levels the vendor guarantees to the client? What are the penalties for violating SLA?
  7. Data Ownership: Who owns the data?
  8. Disaster Recovery: How long would it take to recover from a disaster? Is a secondary data center available 24 x 7?
  9. Disengagement Procedures: How long is data available upon severing the relationship? Who is responsible for data transfer to the new vendor?

    Yuval Lirov, PhD, author of "Practicing Profitability - Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinic and Chiropractic Office: Scheduling, SOAP Notes, Care Plans, Coding, Billing, Collections, and Audit Risk" (Affinity Billing) and "Mission Critical Systems Management" (Prentice Hall), inventor of patents in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Security, and CEO of Vericle.net - Distributed Billing and Practice Management Technologies. Yuval invites you to register to the next webinar on audit risk at BillingPrecision.com

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Monday, December 17, 2007

Finding Good Medical-Billing-Software

Medical-billing-software is designed to allow you to work on your medical billing needs effectively. Whether you are looking for software that will train or software that will allow you to send out those bills, having the right medical-billing software is quite necessary and needed in just about every medical operation out there.

What should you look for in the medical-billing-software that you need?

• Look for products that fit your needs specifically. You will find a wide assortment of options that will include such things as training software as well as medical-billing-software that will allow you to pull together and send out the bills that you need to.
• You will want the right type of software for your medical establishment as far as insurance information. Some various options in the format as well as in the input needed for the bills is also important.
• What works wonderfully in medical-billing-software is the fact that you have a wide range of products that can work with virtually any system set up out there. That means finding the right program for your system requirements.
• One of the most important things to look for in medical-billing-software is simply how easy it is to use. Not all programs are designed with this intention unfortunately. Look for those that do offer it.
• You also will want to choose the medical-billing-software that fits within your budget as well. While this may seem difficult, you have many options out there to consider and you are sure to find those that will work the best available.

You will find many options in medical-billing-software available to you on the web. You will see that there are a number of great options to consider and there is sure to be more than one that fits your specific needs. Yes, it can be exciting to finally be able to get your billing done faster, easier, and even more accurately when you use great products such as medical-billing-software.

for more information please see http://www.medical-billing-software.co.uk

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