Home Forums Is Anyone Using AC with Office Ally Billing??

Hi, is anyone using Office Ally for billing? I am considering using their Practice Management program too, but before I dive in I would like feedback from anyone with experience. We are ready to start with Amazing Charts but my billing manager and office manager are nervous about making sure whatever billing software we choose is user-friendly and efficient. Of course, I have the same concerns. There seem to be some problems with EZ Claims from the postings here, and Medisoft is pricey (5% of collections for practice management) which is more than I'm paying now. Collaborate MD is also costly as our volume is higher and we have to pay a lot more as a result. Office Ally (insurance company-sponsored so costs nothing for the clearinghouse part--just like Availity; $29.95 per month for Practice Management) is by far most economical and according to their representative, they can work directly with Amazing Charts. Is there anyone using AC and Office Ally together? Please give me your thoughts, I really appreciate it!! My staff would love to visit anyone who would let us do so who is successfully using these two together . . . Thanks so much!

Hi and welcome to AC. You should find quite a lot. Do a search on Office Ally.

I must say I am jealous if your nick means you are a dermatologist who gets to drink coffee all day.

It is easy to use and it won't let you get off of the page until the information is correct. How easy is that? We have used it for three years. It replaced a bad biller and more income has come in because of it. I don't know what your office people are worried about. It's a no brainer.

Thanks so much for your response, that makes me feel so much better. It seemed intuitive to me after speaking with their people but with no practical experience one always worries . . . your practice isn't anywhere near Ohio is it?? I was hoping to find someone that would allow us to visit and "see" it in action. Regardless, I truly appreciate your feeback, thank you.

Hi Bert, I didn't have much luck in my search for "Office Ally" but maybe I'm not doing it as efficiently as I could. But anyways, tlelio said it is easy to use, so I feel much more comfortable! My married last name is Coffee, thus the name. Amazingly I never took up coffee drinking in medical school, diet coke kept me awake instead . . .
Thanks a lot for the welcome.

Sorry, the practice is in Illinois. When you start to use it you won't believe how intuitive it is. It is how all software should work. It works great like AC. No issues, no problems.

Maybe Office Ally would let you do a "test" transferring "test data" from the Amazing Charts demo to the Office Ally billing software?

Hi Skindoc,
We are currently using the Practice Mate part of Office ally along iwth AC. AC has a great tech support team and will work with you through various stages of your practice.

Right now ot is triple entry for us because we do not generate our bills from Office Ally. As a Clearinghouse, they have been good. They have good support. They are merciless on mistakes you make-even if you think you are following their advise. In retrospect, the learning curve wasn't that bad and we have been satisfied.
We are looking into using another PM system with Office Ally so that we don't have to triple entry. It will stil be double entry, AC and Medisoft or whatever we choose. I am a good coder, so I just write the codes and have included the CPTs in my templates for the procedures, so it is fairly quick for billing to get the info from my progress note.

We use office mate for billing, but I just cant get around to the double entry required to use practice mate. But the basic upload to just billing is great and easy to use.

Thanks Wayne
We are thinking of adding Medisoft and continuing to use Office Ally once V17 comes out.

Hi Vicki, thanks so much for your reply. So if I understand correctly, you input the CPT/ICD-9 codes into your electronic record then write it down and manually transfer it to your billing people so they can send it through the Office Ally clearinghouse?? Or can the billing people pick up the electronic codes in the EMR and link them to Office Ally? I'm trying to understand where the triple entry comes from. We have a very high volume and I want to try and make this transition smooth for my billing staff. Do we need medisoft or something else to link the two? Or does practice mate take care of it? Medisoft was pretty expensive and defeated the purpose in my mind of using Office Ally and doing our own billing . . . Is there any way my billing manager could talk with your billing manager to see if we can do this too? I would be happy to pay you for her time to talk with us! My staff would really like to talk to someone using the two systems together in a live setting so we know how to set it up and what the pitfalls may be . . .

Thanks Wayne! How do the billing staff pull the codes to bill? Do they have to go into each patient record in the EMR and then transfer them to practice mate?? Since we haven't done this before I'm trying to figure it out. Some people are suggesting a third party like medisoft. I am trying to be that third party as I'd rather hire 1-2 more people and do the work in-house instead of paying our billing service to do it! We have had athenahealth for our practice management so for 7 years we have been electronically scheduling and billing with them, but with paper charts. ICD-9 and CPT codes are put into athenahealth when the patient checks out. Thanks again for your help.

Hi, there, I hope you got some answers already, this was October after all. I've been reasonably successful except for Medicare. Let me know if you want more detail!

Oops, forgot to scroll up! Anyway, you can upload from AC straight to OA for billing, Go to billing, select date range, I do one week at a time, then export to a folder you make for the desktop (mine is titled Office Ally export).In office Ally format (on drop down list) Then sign into Office Ally (you need to do some sort of registration with them)go to upload claims, browse to you desktop and click on the file to submit, highlight and send. The next day you go to claim fix, check if anything needs to be fixed. If your demographics in AC are done right, billing will work, except for Medicare, alas. Ive heard you can also use office Ally as a clearinghouse for Medisoft, does anyone know if this is true?

Sorry, I just circled back around to this section of the Forums.

Skin, to use the actuall PM system (office mate) I believe that you would have to input everything manually. There is no way to upload the AC billing that I know of. You would have to manually enter all the patient demographic data, and then manually input each claim. Unless they changed it since I discussed it with them a year or so ago. I was very dissapointed that they had not provided a way to import the claims and demographic data into Office Mate. Didnt seem very smart to be, but they may know something i don't.

We are currently using a billing company that was referred to us from A/C but they are increasing our rates. Does anyone know who we should turn to? I am not sure how to do it myself into these billing companies others are mentioning. I export all the billings we are doing through the amazing charts now.
Thanks,
Sandy

We use the basic Office Ally clearinghouse. Works great. Just export your day's bills, then upload to office ally. check the next day for rejects, and correct them.

We do not use their practice mgmt system, so i cannot comment on that.