Would like billing types to be attached per patient, not per family.
Would like billing types to be attached per patient, not per family.
Your enhancement request has been received, thank you for the idea.
10 comments
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Greg Gibson
commented
I think there are a few issues here that are all getting mixed together.
BT is used to separate different groups of patients for billing or for reporting. When putting each patient in their own family as their own HofH, BT works at the patient level. Since BT is a filter on almost every report and is also a filter on the billing statements, the BT field is extremely useful. Unfortunately, there are some issues with BT:a) BT can change and in some clinics it changes often. When BT changes and it is also being used as a filter on a report, the data given by that report will be different. Reports using BT as filters are point-in-time reports. Whatever the BT value for the family is in the family file when the report is generated is used.
b) If you are using BT to group bills in a specific way, you usually cannot also use it to report on groups of patients in a different way or to do reporting for a different purpose.
c) Some financial reports like medicaid vs non-medicaid visits could be built into reporting without needing to rely on BT. BT doesn't really work for this purpose anyway, as many patients move in and out of state/federal aid monthly. Changing BT to keep up with this is not practical. This report should be filtered by the insurance company attached to the procedures.
d) By design, BT operates at the family level and not at the patient level. You can get around this by putting every patient in their own family as HofH.
e) Putting each patient in as their own family/HofH often requires double entering patients. Dentrix Enterprise enforces a family relationship between patients when setting the insurance subscriber for each patient.
f) The reporting system in Dentrix Enterprise is not based on batches. In older medical systems, batches of say treatments and payments were posted, reconciled, and tracked. The data as of a certain time could always be regenerated by looking at the batches up to that point in time.If BT is changed to per-patient, all the reports as well as statement billing will need to be updated to work correctly. That is a lot of work to take on in one upgrade cycle. Instead, I think different billing type data tags are needed and I can think of three specific types:
a) BT-family (this is the one used now, and I vote that we leave it alone)
b) BT-patient (this would be individual to the patient and a new field in family file)
c) BT-Procedure (this would tag the procedure either with a copy of one of the other BT-data tags when the procedure is posted, or with its own values.)Many reports will need to be changed to allow the use of these three data tags as filters. In the interim, organizations can write reports themselves to get clean data that does not change by using the BT-Procedure field. A couple of other fields might be added to the procedure too, including one for sliding scale.
Patients cannot have insurance subscribers set from a different "family" with double entering that subscriber into the family of the patient. In my opinion, it is very important to remove this restriction.
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Heather McConnell
commented
We have not used Family File for Family/PT set up. We have set up each pt as HofH and their own family.. Now w/5010 requirements for additional subscriber information on claim, we are having to "move" PTs into a family and it is tedious, taking forever, etc, etc. Why not have an option under the insurance block, to key in the subscriber information instead of creating families? Due to BT problems, we cannot put Medicaid pts under their family.
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Heather McConnell
commented
We use BT to run statements and create financial stmt reports. IT would be usedful to have BT applied to a specific procedure, instead of a moment in time. BT can change throughout the year and if you run a report for the year, you receive inaccurate info if a BT has changed. Also, the BT needs to be by PT and not family. 1 family member could have Medicaid ins and HoH and Spouse commercial insurance. Your #'s if run via BT are then scewed under present criteria.
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Karyn
commented
We use the billing types to group our "avenues" of billing - Medicaid, Private Insurance, Sliding Scale, Uncompensated Care, Military, etc (regardless of the individual insurance plans). Our intention is to be able to group same or similar types of coverage and have this data stay the same for historical transactions.
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Jackie Kersey-SCHC
commented
I use bill types to record charges, payments, encounters, & AR by financial class
MCD
INS
Self Pay
Slide -
We are looking at this feature and need some help on brainstorming. We would like everyone to list what they are currently using billing types for, since we understand that there are many possible uses for billing types. Please comment here and give us a list of what you use billing types for.
Thanks!
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Barbara
commented
Attaching the Billing type to the procedure would be more helpful for us. We do NYS Medicaid and with the new HMO's is hard, they cover regular work but the Orthodontics are covered under Medicaid. So it is hard to report our income correctly.
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Karyn
commented
Also, please store the billing type with the ledger transactions. We are given the option of running most of the DX1 reports with a billing type filter, but if the billing type changes then historic data changes also. If a patient was billing type 2 when I ran a report in January, we change them to billing type 3 in March, but in April I want to re-run the January number, the details that were previously included in my report for billing type 2 are no longer there. This makes for inconsistencies in reporting.
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Anonymous
commented
I agree, should have been done a long time ago.
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Greg Gibson
commented
This could be done and allow each family member to get their own bill. Also there is no technical reason to limit the assigning of insurance to someone within a specific family group. In the case of a divorced family, children on one account can certainly have the insurance of their dad even if he is on a new account. I do not see anything in the db structure that would make this a particularly difficult change, but maybe I am missing something.
