Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Office Ally

I just wanted to suggest to you who are considering V7 that you will be paying $150/month for Gateway EDI clearing house. We have been using Office Ally for several years at a cost of $0/month. I think they get their money from the insurance companies. I cannot understand why AC would tack this extra cost onto us. As far as I can tell there is no advantage to Gateway. I contacted Trish at AC and Claire responded. Email is always hard to read but I found her response slightly dismissive. She essentially said they are using Gateway and they may add other clearing houses in the future but that Office Ally was not on the list. She suggested I have them contact AC which I have done. If others of you are using or are interested in using a FREE clearing house I would suggest you look into Office Ally and perhaps suggest to AC that they consider them. No I do not work for OA and I gain nothing other than having a clearing house with which I am quite content at zero cost integrated with AC. Thanks for listening.

Bill, I don't know but it may well be that OA isn't interested in working with AC at this level. Of course, you have spoken with them, and I haven't so you may be more informed that me.

Just consider though, OA has gone from being just a clearinghouse, to offering a full suite of solutions including a practice mgmt system, emr and patient portal. They are all accessible from OA's website and I assume they are at least somewhat integrated.

OA already has AC users billing through their clearinghouse. How much benefit will OA get from cooperating with AC? I do feel that AC should by trying to work with OA on this though. I suspect quite a few of their customers us OA for the clearing house.

We use OA clearinghouse and would like to get ERA into the V7 PM module. Looks like we can't, which is really a problem. I don't plan on increasing our costs by $150/month. I'm really disappointed that OA "is not on the list" because from my perspective they should be one of the top clearinghouses AC should be trying to work with for operation with the V7 capabilities. But its from my perspective, not AC's and not OA's, who both have different objectives from mine.

I have the same issue. I agreed to beta test V7 but as soon as I learned everything will go through a fee-for-service clearinghouse, I aborted. I also now use OA and am very pleased with it, including the tech support. I think the fact that AC insists on partnering with a cleraringhouse which charges an extra monthly fee is near-sighted on their part.

Please forward these important comments to AC! They need to know how we feel.

Hello,

We have received the requests for Office Ally to be added as a clearinghouse option for PM. While GatewayEDI will be our first clearinghouse linked to PM we will be adding others as we go along. We have added Office Ally to the list that will be considered. I cannot say at this time how that will go but the request has been heard and has been forwarded on to the correct people here at Amazing Charts. If there are other clearinghouses that users have had good experiences with please let me know.

Claire

Full Disclosure: I am employed for Professional Data Management, Inc. which is a Medical Billing Company as its software developer and IT support.

The reason, I'll venture, that Office Ally is not on their list is because of how limited OA is. We considered using OA years ago and immediately dismissed the idea. The first issue is OA doesn't cover enough carriers in our area. And for far too many carriers, OA does not offer Electronic Remittance Advice and there are other features OA didn't have at the time, such as onsite customer service and advanced reporting.

For those of you using OA, ask how many payments you are having to manually post. You may be using up that $150 that Gateway charges in raw labor, and then some.

Without the ability to auto-post electronic remittance advice, we simply would not be able to function. The picture below is a report from our Auto Payment Posting program, which I wrote, that shows how many transactions (insurance payments, adjustments, etc.) are posted automatically requiring no human intervention (Good Transactions) as opposed to the ones that must be manually posted (Bad Transactions).



JamesNT

JamesNT,

You definitely have my interest, and I would like clarification. Is the physician directly submitting the billing data to the auto payment posting program? Therefore eliminating in house or out of house manual posting of bills? If that is the case, can you compare the ability to capture the correct billing data between the two methods --good and bad transactions. And is there a significant difference? When I submit my "paper" superbill to our in house employees to post the superbill there is a manual transaction every time, which I rely on to fill in any missed modifiers, q codes or G codes. I try to get every bit of billing data on the superbill at the time of the visit so it is fresh in my mind and as accurate as can be, but I would be interested to know if the manual posting is superior or inferior to capturing the information over the auto posting.

How about adding Availity? I think they do a great job. It's a one time fee and no monthly fees. I used RelayHealth in the past and their monthly fee was $90.

IntMedDoc (how about giving us a name we can use to address you?)

I used Availity also but found they did not have enough carriers and Medicare was a problem for us. So I made the switch to OA. I am not using it for my accounting. I still post to my old PM Visionary.

Jimmie,

Thsi is typicall how it works:

Step 1. The provider submits his billing to us (usually a superbill). The provider office either faxes to us, scans then uploads to us via SFTP, or we interface with his EMR.

Step 2. Our staff then fixes modifiers and so forth and then bills out the claim to the clearinghouse who then sends to the carriers.

Step 3. The auto posting program you saw is completely automated. There is no user interface. It downloads remit files from the clearinghouse's SFTP server and posts them automatically. Reports are available that show all transactions that went in with no problem, transactions that could not be posted and the reason why (e. g. bad date stamp, etc.), claims that have not been paid in x number of days, etc.

Step 4. Our staff reviews the bad transaction report and posts those transactions manually.

In regards to capturing correct billing data, no matter how you slice it and dice it correct billing comes down to the provider. If the provider forgets to enter a diag code into the EMR or circle a diag code on the paper superbill, sooner or later someone has to come back behind him and clean it up. We work with our providers to explain this and help them. And our staff has years of experience fixing bad claims.

The auto payment posting program's job is to save labor. Like the sentence at the bottom says, we would have to hire way more employees to post that many transactions manually. Instead, we are able to pass cost savings over to our clients in the form of lower percentage rates and "freebie" work.

JamesNT

Incidentally, we use RealMed for our Clearinghouse.

JamesNT

Thank you JamesNT

We don't autopost now because it is not supported on our current PM system. Would this save us a lot of time? I pay a biller a percentage of the collections so unless I change the way I do things, it really doesn't matter to me how we get our money as long as we do.
Office Ally supports 100% of the carriers we bill but perhaps that is not the case in other markets.
True, they do not offer on site support but we have an experienced biller who has found the phone support more than adequate. Perhaps if we did not have that situation on site support would be more important.
As a one physician office OA seems to work for me.
I would love to be convinced that paying the $150/month would improve my situation. Would it allow me to do the billing myself without having to pay a percentage of my collections to an experienced biller?

Bill,

It all comes down to a question of what's right for you. If you autopost and automate some other tasks, will that make up for the $150 that GatewayEDI will cost? Do you really want to change anything about how you do things now? How is your biller doing?

The only way to know what to do is to answer those questions.

JamesNT

JamesNT,
Have you ever thought about or done a seminar teaching docs how to scrub their own superbills, with the intent or hope of minimizing the "manual superbill scrubber" and eliminate or reduce that step, and just autopost directly from the doctor superbill?

Have I thought about it?

Yes.

Am I the person to do it?

No.

I'm the IT person. Either my boss or one of the team leads in our office would be more qualified.

JamesNT

We are also beta testing V7.

As a single physician office who has used Office Ally since 2009, I am encouraged to hear other users encouraging AC to work with OA.

Aside from the $150.00 monthly fee from Gateway, I am concerned about the downtime in reimbursements from Medicare (65% of our practice). It seems any change (address, clearing house, phases of the moon), is reason enough for Medicare (First Coast) to delay reimbursements.

Hopefully, we will see some updated information on V7 and interfaces soon.

Somewhat a tangent - anyone know of a Doc using the OA EMR - Practice Mate? We have been asked to meet with a practice using OA/PracticeMate that is willing to consider AC.

Anyone have some tidbits? Bites?

The OA EMR is not Practice Mate Practice Mate is actually now the billing segment. It has an accounting feature that the previous OA apparently did not. There is an EMR module but I have not looked at it.

Thanks Leslie - you ever seen the EMR?

I get the impression that it is under-whelming.

No, but they are having a free webinar tomorrow

Amazing Charts is committed to providing chooses for the clients but with the complexity of PM we are starting with one clearinghouse. This is to allow us to fine tune the process and work through bugs. At this time we do not have at timeline for additional clearinghouses to be added. But as this becomes available we will share the information with our users. Thank you for your patience and continued support.

Claire

Fantastic Claire!
I had a meeting with my manager and biller. We are quite excited about AC V7. AC has always been in favor of making things easier and cost effective for small practices. OA must be an option AC should consider soon, even before gateway, but I guess at this time feel happy with your openness to work on it!.

I am using OA and very happy about it. Practice mate is working well too. Friend of mine is using OA for her EMR, I looked - AC is better by far. I will not switch to V7 without compatibility with OA. Moreover, I think it is wrong to stir all AC customers to ONE clearing house. IMHO it might lead to legal problems.

Steering customers to one Clearinghouse will not cause legal problems. Like any other service or product, people will either go for it or they won't.

This does not mean you can't use the PM feature of the upcoming Amazing Charts. You can use another clearing house. You just won't get any group discounts. ***

***I say this assuming Amazing Charts generates the 837 claims files in a folder where you can upload them to where you wish rather than sending them straight to Gateway EDI.

JamesNT

When I was beta testing V7 I was then using Availity as my clearing house. I tried to upload claims generated in AC to it and was not successful. But, That has been a while ago and perhaps it has been corrected.

People have been exporting files to OA with Amazing Charts for some time although I understand it takes some tweaking for some files. I think it is normal for a company to start by making one clearing house - my Medisoft PM supports one that they sell (ie make a cut of the profit) and that is normal. The fact that AC has made it possible to export and use elsewhere is the exception not the rule.

I see no reason why Ver 7 would take away the export function using 837 fields.

Most PM softwares export the claims to an 837 file and allow you to upload to where you wish.

The statement of supporting one clearinghouse over another is political, not technical. As long as your clearinghouse can parse the files, you've got it made. You just may not receive the price breaks everyone else is receiving depending on the situation.

JamesNT

I agree with everyone who wants more Clearinghouses to use with AC. We had been with AC for 3 1/2 years and just recently bailed on AC to go to Practice Fusion, Practice Mate, Availity, and Office Ally. And guess what? NOW, we actually DO HAVE a COMPLETELY FREE EHR with FREE PM/billing software! WHAT A CONCEPT! So far, Practice Fusion's EHR is just as good as AC we feel or better (you can actually open MORE than ONE chart at a time!) and of course, WHAT could be better than FREE BILLING! I will update our experience in a month or so after our EUPHORIA is over for NOT PAYING for ANYTHING now lol.

Wayne

Wayne,

Believe me, you are paying for it. Just not in the "cut a check for an invoice" kinda way.

JamesNT

Last week I upgraded to AC 6.3.3- now unable to file claims through Office Ally.
OA reports that issue is migration of Payer ID data into address field.
AC reports files are A-OK.
What to do?

You need a tie-breaker. If you can, open up the file and verify the position of the Payer ID data. If you don't know how to read an 837 file, find someone who does.

If you want, I can take a look at it for you.

JamesNT

So, can I make sure I understand this properly? I currently use OA and do our own billing which works perfectly for us. If we upgrade to V7 (when it's ready) can't we use all the other PM functions and still do our billing the way we used to? and then we wouldn't incur any further costs right?

Right

thanks! Phew!

Our ten-physician internal medicine group has used ENS as a clearinghouse for a number of years and our office manager is very happy with it. Gateway would cost us about $100 more per physician per month. We do not yet have an EHR but are looking and plan to adopt one by next summer.

Stopped using AC a couple of years ago for various reasons. Migrated to PF which has been great but made the mistake of using Kareo for PM. It was terrible. Now waiting to hear which PMs PF will integrate with. The list cost out at the end of March and I hope Office Ally is on the list. I too would like a free solution to EMR and PM as I am a very small solo practice.