Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Medisoft, ERA's, clearinghouse, AC version 7 ...

Wonder if anyone here has any input on the following.

I have Medisoft version 15 network in the office. I submit claims electronically by generating a file in Medisoft which is then uploaded to a clearinghouse, "mdon-line". So far this has been working alright, a bit pricey for the clearinghouse, around $70-$80 a month, but not bad.

Have now been looking into getting the EOB's electronically, the so-called ERA's or Electronic Remittance Advice. The idea being to automatically post the income into the billing program, rather than doing it manually, which should save time.

My clearinghouse can provide the ERA's for $10 a month, that's fine, but getting the data into Medisoft is turning out to be a problem. I don't use a vendor, I have dealt with Medisoft, now owned by McKesson, directly. Medisoft will only support direct importation of ERA's if I use their clearinghouse, RelayHealth, and I can only use RelayHealth if I upgrade to Medisoft version 17 (for about $3,000).

If AC version 7 will actually have practice management built in and if it will support ERA's, I'm probably better off waiting for that. Yes?

Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone have experience with importing ERA's into Medisoft without using RelayHealth?

Thanks for any ideas.

Michael

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Michael Jacobson, MD
Internal Medicine and Cardiology
New York, NY

Addendum to the above:

I just found a company that will interface the ERA's with Medisoft, for a monthly fee, without requiring an upgrade to the latest version of Medisoft (EZEOB). May go that route. If anyone has any experience with them, please let me know.

Michael

Edited by admin. Post in regular forum by vendor who sells Medisoft.

Just wanted to give f/u to my original post.

I have, in fact, signed up for EZEOB for now. It does allow me to automatically post downloaded ERA's from my clearinghouse (mdon-line) to my medisoft v15. It's not totally without effort and if an ERA has just one or two claims in it, it might not be much of a timesaver over entering them manually, since you have to do some file manipulation, but when you do a large medicare EOB, it obviously saves time.

It's not cheap, about $100 or $150 (can't remember) to sign up, and then $40 a month for the service. But it saved me the cost of upgrading my medisoft from v15 to v17 and being forced to use McKesson's clearinghouse, which is a great satisfaction. It seems to work with prior versions of medisoft also.

I'm hoping that AC 7's PM component will take care of all of this, and will play nicely with my clearinghouse. Then I will be able to drop medisoft completely as well as EZEOB.

Michael Jacobson
New York

I think you did good, Michael. Based on recent experience with Version 6, Version 7 is also almost certain to take a while to be totally stable. If you have a working billing system, I think it is a lot less scary to fork out a few bucks for the next year than to feel you need to jump into Version 7 when it is released. Buggy billing can really ruin your year.

Hi. there, Never used this site before but have some questions, and maybe someone out there has some experience with it and could reply. We are a new practice, located in FL, Medicare is submitted through First Coast (FC) and they are slow in adding 5010 compliant vendors for clearing. To-date we have found only one PM vendor that will work with the AC that is on the FC list so that we can bill. We are not allowed to submit paper bills. I know you can't recommend specific vendors but we need a billing system! We have our own full time billing person we brought with us. The one vendor we found is looking at > 12k to sign up for PM. This sounds insane to me, but maybe I don't know enough. Does any one have experience working with vendors not on the AC list? Is a PM vendor necessary, and have any of you been able to use a Clearing Firm directly and routinely without major headaches?

David,

Thanks, that was exactly my thought. Initially I thought I'd wait for version 7 before doing ERA's electronically (rather than on paper like I was doing), then I figured I'm better off going EDI sooner and switching to version 7 when it's working well.

Michael

Re: GIGI
We have been using Medware (now Medware by SAGE) for about 15 years -- started with DOS program-- for billing. They were really inexpensive at first, and even now are quite reasonable, and have kept up with all the "innovations" in billing. They are a Florida company; seems like they would have the clearinghouse problem pretty well down in that state.

Amazing Charts is a much later addition to office management, and probably we will eventually transition to their billing program, but it seems like it will be difficult to improve on what we have -- except for the modest awkwardness of running two concurrent systems.

It is really instructive to read this site -- amazing how many parasites are latched onto the body of the "healthcare industry".

Amazing Charts is awesome.

You can try EZ claims, I've been using them for last four years. There is free interface to transfer billing info from AC into EZ claims.