Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Billing/Practice Management options for Amz users

hi all,
Please send your thoughts on the best billing/practice management options for Amazing charts users. We are currently using local billing company who charge 10% for billing and collection service.
Thanks

I am about to give Office Ally a try. The billing company that I used for my first year of practice charged a flat rate of 30K, worked out to be about 8% of collections. I'd rather keep that in my own poket. So after lloking around we decided to try Office Ally. We make the switch beginning of Sept.

I was using an outside billing service with superbills until the beginning of this year. They were increasingly lousy. I switched to Office Ally and EZ claims but there were problems with claims going to Illinois Public Aid. IDPA was stating it was Office Ally's problem, OA stated it was IDPA's.

I finally gave up and went with MTBC, the AC billing system. They charge 5%, the interface looks good with a lot of reports, checks and balances. It's too early to say how well they are working, I have been using them less than a month. They seem very responsive at this time, something I know has been a problem in the past.

We have been using MTBC since we have implemented AC (which is 2 months) they seem pretty responsive to issues and are actively working out problems that come up. Reports are extensive and easily accessible online. Still trying to figure out how best to use that information. They do charge 5%, but they are including co-pays and even "cash pay" patients in that number. So take a look at your contract closely.

Wendell,
If you are using Office Ally, do you need EZ Claim also? I thought you can enter the charges on Office Ally directly and it can interface with Amazing charts.
Thanks

MTBC claims that they charge 5% of colections but since they also charge 5% of co-pays and cash pay I find it to be more like 5% of total charges. Somewhat misleading. But they are a "partner" with AC. Like Nuance DNS 10 Medical? Why dont we just drop the partnership? What are we getting in return from these "partnered" vendors?

I have been using MTBC for 2 years for 4% of collections and I am very satisfied with quality of their work. Collections are good.T hey are very polite and responsive to corrections. Of course, sometimes they do small mistakes like missing modifiers, which I monitor and correct promptly. I look over all my EOBs and assign my receptionist or MTBC to investigate denials. I would spend much more money hiring an in-house billing person and paying for billing software and postage expences. I believe "AC "partnered" vendors make it possible to upload bills directly from AC to the billing company, otherwise we would have to printout daily superbills and scan them for FTP upload.

We pay Medical Practice Made Perfect, an outside billing company, 6% of their collections. We do not pay this % on cash or copays that we collect on our side. Rather than printing out daily superbills and scanning, we print a weekly batch directly to a PDF file and then do a secure FTP upload to their server. I had to create a small MSaccess file to create these printouts from the AC database. The printouts are pulled on a date range that I enter. The date used is the actual entry date into the system rather than the encounter date.

for those using office ally-how can you generate reports without double entry?
right now I am uploading the claims at the end of the day-but I would like to be able to generate reports-for that I would have to enter all the info into OA and then "create" and office visit IN OA!

We like the service at MTBC, but when they insisted we inform them how much we collected in terms of cash and Copays, it was a little irritating to say the least. We have decided that for now the service they provide is worth the little extra.

Maybe the next version of AC, practice management will just solve this problem for us.

I had started to use EZ Claim/Office ally combination because I had heard there were a lot of problems with files directly to office ally. Yes, we could reenter the charges directly, but I was looking for a direct AC to Billing and no reentry.

I stopped using it because OA could not connect to ILL Medicaid correctly and no one would own up to the problem. I was not getting paid.

I was aware that MTBC charges for copay AND capitation amounts. My previous biller charged for copays, not cap.

MTBC has a 4% and "deluxe" 5% billing systems. To directly connect to AC they charge 5%, but you could print to PDF and send them the claims and get the 4%. I don't remember what they add for the 1% beyond their own EMR and a e prescription program.

At the conference, Jon was upfront that he does get 1% from MTBC.

It's been about 1 month and they are getting up to speed. Somewhat slow for my tastes, but I am willing to give them a little time.

I do have a 1 year contract, that agrees to pay the remainder of the contract with a pro rated portion of the prior months bills.

From the conference, I think the practice management portion may be somewhat slow in coming. Version 4 will probably be SQL and minor tweaks (please give me the updated immunization section, please please please). You may have to wait to version 5 for practice management. Anyone who knows more, please chime in.


Indira wrote
Wendell,
If you are using Office Ally, do you need EZ Claim also? I thought you can enter the charges on Office Ally directly and it can interface with Amazing charts.
Thanks

We are trying out using AC directly w/ OA--but there's a lot of little bumps that we're trying to iron out right now, so if you want to do it, try with only a few test patients. I'm also wondering if the rumors that AC does bad math is true...

Thanks Wendell,
We are paying 10% of collections now, So have to change to keep afloat, keep the overhead low. will work on change soon
Indira

I use MBPros (medical billing professionals). Medisoft is the system they use so if you ever choose to leave them, you can bring your data back into your own system if you have the basic Medisoft program (under $300 I believe). MBPros has various levels of service but what is working well for me is the Premium Plus. I print the AC CMS1500 forms to pdf for the day into paperport and fax to MBPros. They post and it is sent within 24 hours typically. EOBs are scanned/faxed or mailed to them. Patient payments are entered online (I do this once a week). THey have been very responsive and knowledgeable. I currently pay $2.65 per claim with minimum $89.95 per month. Aging reports etc are available. If you typical visit collection ws $50, this is 5.3% of collections; if it is $85 then the rate is 3.1%. They also offer lower rates per claim if you pre-pay for a volume of 1000 or more.

As a follow up to what Carla FNP said, yes, we at Medical Billing Professionals offer a billing service that is usually much less expensive than billing services charging a percentage of the amount collected. Visit our website, www.mbpros.com, for more information. And, what Carla indicated about printing a batch of claim forms to a PDF file and securely emailing them to us works well...it's very easy to have front desk staff do this on a daily or weekly basis...and then the claims are submitted by us timely and accurately.

We were using excel to get information to our biller, then we noticed that he wasn't accurate when EOB's were checked. We decided to use Office Ally alone. It is free and easy. It won't let you proceed until you have all the correct information on the 1500 form. Money has started to come in.

I don't think MTBC is a good deal due to there portion including anything you collect like self pays, other cash. They aren't doing any work so why are they getting a cut.

im new to AC and am looking at MTBC or billig needs.

Any comments re recent experience

with this AC partner?

I understand that AC will be adding PMS "soon"--any connection to MTBC? Should I hold off and wait for the AC product?

thanks Mike

This is my experience:

Didn't work for me, cost me lots of $$$ to get out of the contract. Horrible experience.

Steer clear of them!

I found MTBC to be grossly incompetent and after paying for setup and spending 6 months trying to get everything set up they let me know that I would have to write off my AR!!! once they started billing. I told them never mind as I could not and would not write off my Medicare AR (100k) and I still haven't received a refund.

short of buying PMS, what other successful options have others utilized?

Practice Mate with Office Ally is an option. That is what we have been using, though I just started outsourcing again.

I think Office Ally works well so far. We are even submitting claims that were rejected and never followed up by a billing company. I like the fact that nobody gets a percentage of the copays and cash that we collect. I think the person at the front desk is your most important asset. They have to be honest and straight forward for your practice to be a success.

I know this has been addressed in other threads but I just wanted to hear from the most recent posters re: office ally. Are you guys entering everyone's info twice? Once in AC and once in OA? That seems like a real pain. I currently have all my patient's info entered into American Medical Software for billing and I am nearly ready to implement AC. One of the biggest hurdles for me in getting started with AC is the PM piece. I have a woman who comes in weekly and does the billing, collections, EOBs, etc. for 6% of collections. We have looked into OA and run some successful test claims and it looks like it would work for us. But when I implement AC, it looks like we will need to reenter all the info into both AC and OA. Ugh!! Am I missing something?

To answer my own question, I heard back from OA and there is no interface with AC so you need to enter all info twice (unless you use e-prescribing, then you need to enter it 3 times. hmmmm.

I agree that entering the information is a pain. The OA program will remember the information after you do this for future claims. This program has allowed us to collect $5000.00 missed by an outside biller.