We have a external billing company that has does a good job and priced well for both of us. We do not use AC's billing component. With x-link being added to AC3B, if this works, then we are investigating and testing and will buy a pm for demographics, scheduling, recalls, various printing options, PDA support, hospital rounds and offsite procedure automated billing entry, connection to automated calling, reducing repeated entry of the same data, etc.
Billing companies often use one of the PM systems as their tool for billing, or have developed their own software to do edi and other direct bill or clearinghouse operations, etc. Some of the PMs appear to support sharing the database across the internet or generate files that can be sent (with the appropriate securities) back and forth between the provider and the biller systems. (This happens with the billing companies formally supporting transaction with AC's billing system) Our biller is adding MicroMD and MicroMD seems to have many of the features we are looking for otherwise in a PM. MicroMD web blurbs say it is HL7 compliant and supports the X-link transaction process.
Most PMs, listed in AC3B and others, claim HL7 and X-link compatability (may use different verbage though..). The ...small problem... is that it appears that the X-link program needs to be written specifically for each pairing, as it is not 'smart' enough to know that a phone number in one location in the data string of one record in Lytec is not a phone number in Medisoft, MARS, MicroMD, AltaPoint, etc. This is good for X-link, and not so good if a specific version needs to be written for a pairing not yet widely marketed by the two products (ie EMR and PM). I was quoted $5000 (by the PM) to develop an X-link.net derived program for AC3 not in AC3's current list. Of course the PM thinks 30K purchase price, minimum of 12K plus travel/housing/food for the 2-3 trainers (more than my staff size) and the discounted 19% annual maintainence fee of total sales is a fair market price (if the trainers drink, then maybe $60K? :roll: ). Not exactly in keeping with the AC philosophy (50+% maint fee, modest purchase price)....
Geoff
