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Until the PM and billing components get better on AC, has anyone kept track of pt billing by using good old fashioned Excel spreadsheet to track pt visit day and copays and balance received from insurers. That may seem simplistic and I am a beginning business person, but I feel that may work until my volume increases since I will be slow at the upstart? Could the more experienced business people in this forum please chime in. I may have missed a functionality on AC that does this already, but it seems a good way to make sure you get paid and anyone can keep track at the front desk, etc... I am worried about losing bills to third party billers and want a simple way to keep track until we get a good PM component (I don't want to waste thousands on PM for record keeping when AC is almost done with theirs!)

I have used this method in a former medical life and it worked adequeately. It is more labor intensive, but it works well and is not a bad option for a new start up. It can be a solution for keeping track of the $ until a PM is in place.

Wendell
Do you remember how you set up your excel sheets...i.e.
patient/ dos/insurance 1/insurance2/ copayment/ insurance payment/write off/patient balance

Am I missing anything here?

Thanks

All of the fields are in AC. Take a dummy patient and mark up all the fields with descriptons (first ins grp #, sec ins address ect). Then create a superbill by making a dummy visit or addendum. (This will give you column names.) Finally go to billing and export a few bills, the dummy one included, highlight the bills and export to CSV.

Then import the CSV into excel, hopefully the "marked up" one will be on top, if not copy and paste.

You will need to add payment columns. The problem is that they are likely to be out in the AR, AQ distant colums (something like 40 columns in a HCFA 1500.) If you add payments in you add the date and the payment

You then need to run a pivot table report. This is not commonly used, but is a powerful report generator and will do sums based on each change in name or patient number. This will allow you to keep track of balances.

When insurance payments come in you will also need to have a discount/write off/reduced column.

It ain't pretty, it will not easily do individual CPTs and it is definately a stop gap measure, but it will work.

Caveat. I have not used this method in 20 years. Pivot tables did not exist then, but I know this is how you would do it now. Actually, it was done on a Mac SE.

Microsoft Office began as a Mac program. At that time I was working for a CHC and their computer system died. I had created a template in excel to print to HCFA 1500 so that I could bill for separate hospital that I was moonlighting and I offered them this system as a stop gap measure until they could find another. They actually used it for over a year.

thanks Wendell, very informative!