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Who are we?
The author is a Chiropractic Husband, which makes him Chief Technical
Officer, gardener and plumber for his wife's business. My name is Bernie Hunt
and the business is Turner Chiropractic Offices, located in Queens NY. We are
running a client/server network with a Microsoft NT server and mostly Win98
workstations. All our hardware is from Dell.
Yes I know you can get computers much cheaper from your brother in law or
cousin, but we decided to go with Dell and 3 year warranties. That way I don't
have to worry about any hardware problems for the life of the machine.
For ODBC I've used Access and Crystal, with Crystal being my main engine.
I've found that it gives me easier control and more reporting features. I'm just
starting to use Visual Basic for some special needs that neither Crystal or
Access can handle. At the moment all my "production" reports are in
Crystal.
Our current production reports are as follows:
- No Fault Interest Calculator
- The State of NY allows us to collect interest on outstanding No Fault
bills. ECLIPSE has a nice feature to calculate interest on bills. In NY you
can compound the interest, so ECLIPSE's standard interest feature would
leave money on the table. This report takes a patient number and calculates
the compounded interest due on all outstanding bills. It also includes in
the footer the chapter and verse of the NY State law that says the interest
is due. That helps our collectors convince the companies that we are owed
that money.
Worker Comp Interest Calculator- Same concept as the No Fault Interest Calculator except the interest rate
is different and the chapter and verse of the law is different.
Total Adjustments/Write Offs- Moneys adjusted off of bills are dollars thrown away. This report displays
all adjustments to monies owed during a user defined period. It lists them
by Patient and Case and sorts them so that the largest write-offs are listed
first. We use this report in a Collections Department meeting every month to
discuss what and why are we writing off so much money.
CPT Codes- This is a trio of reports that print out Office/CPT codes by CPT Code,
Office Code and Billing Profile. They were developed to help us get control
over a growing number of Office Codes. They make is easy to compare what
codes we have and how they are set up. Using them we were able to find more
than a few situation where over the years Office Codes were added that don't
conform exactly with other codes.
Office Code Usage- This is a simple report but long. It checks for how many times each Office
Code has been used over the life of the database. We only have data since
the beginning of 1993, but it's still a lot of records. This report lists
all your Office Codes and then gives a total per code of how many times that
Code has ever been used. Very helpful in cleaning out old Office/CPT Codes
that aren't needed. This will quickly point out the ones that are not used
and could be removed without harming past data. This report also gives a
drill down ability to locate actual transactions using a specific code. This
part helps locate transactions you need to modify when you have duplicate
codes and want to phase out one of them and still retain past data accuracy.
Old Outstanding Bills- As part of our upgrade to Version 8, we started a process to clean up all
our data. This report searched through all open Bills and lists any of them
that were created before 1998. It prints the list by patient and patient
file. It's used to review old bills to determine if they are still
collectable, should be written-off or are accounting errors during entry.
The 1998 date was arbitrary for the amount of data that the report produced.
Once we have this group under control, the we'll start printing the report
for all bills before 1999 and etc.
Major Med Objective Targeting- This report finds all outstanding Major Medical Bills, based on a Billing
Profile, that are over Net 60. It groups the bills by Payor and sub groups
by Patient. Each bill is listed with bill date and amount. The Payors are
listed in descending order by amount owed. This gives our collector the
ability to print the report and have the highest dollar value target first.
With all the patients for that Payor grouped together, each Patient can be
address with one telephone call to the Payor. The Net 60 filter on bills is
an arbitrary number that we have found to use. Will mail delays and paper
processing, most of our bills are getting paid under net 60. You can easily
adjust this parameter to file your practice.
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Future Plans
- Friday Report
- This is a replacement of a current manual report that shows the
Collections Departments performance for the last week. It also helps us to
set objectives for the next week by visually displaying what monies are
possible for collections and where our manpower is best deployed. This
report may have to be done in VB due to it's complexity and mixing of data
types. Crystal sets some limits on how data can be displayed and I have yet
to find a way to exactly duplicate the current manual report.
This report also includes a sorting system that we use for WC and No Fault
cases. We break them down into 4 or 5 categories that define the progression
of the case. That way we can see which monies are actually collectable
versus which monies are awaiting a judge's decision. Currently this
information is contained in an Excel spreadsheet. We need to find a field we
can using in the Patient Case table to hold the status code. Then we can
report on the WC and No Fault cases by their status. There are user comment
fields in the Patient table, but many patients have multiple WC or No Fault
cases, so we need to put the status in the Patient Case table. The current
plan is to use the comment field that displays on HCFA forms. We'll have to
make the status something cryptic so it does not cause problems with the
insurance companies. I hope that someday MPN will add a comment field in the
Patient Case that only stays in the computer and does not print on bills.
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