Home Forums Discussions Coding and Billing Billing companies update with AC integration

I am unhappy with my billing company which requires all sorts of double-entry and other problems. I have seen the 3 partners for AC (NY Billing, PMG, Kareo) and their info on the AC website, saw other info such as EZ Claim billing service, EMBG.
Any newer info and resources? I want as few steps as possible for my staff to submit info to a billing company from AC. Thanks.

Did you end up using any of the three? I am faced with the same decision.

Regards,
Pierre

We use one of the three (I believe), NY-Med Billing, and the process is fairly simple. We just batch the bills and send them out. The only problem is that there is apparently nothing to add a copay to until a bill is created. So I had to write a separate app to keep track of all patient payments (I'm sure there are other options), and I add the copays to the bills before they're batched and sent. But we are a very small practice, one solo Family Doc, and I could see how for a larger practice this could become burdensome.
It's not hard to reach the billers by email, and they usually reply promptly. You can write to me if you'd like further information at kurtkaufman at hotmail dot com.

Revisiting this same question, several years later. We originally went with an AC affiliated company and then brought billing in house back in 2014. Outsourced locally in 2017 and am not looking to make another change.

Would love to get feedback from folks who are using AC affiliated companies. Thank you.

I use an employee in house and Caretracker Billing. Caretracker is a Harris computing company and does interact with AC. It has worked fairly well but has a few issues. The biller states that this is much easier than when we previously used Kareo. It is much more expensive than Kareo. BAse rate of $429 vs $288. The inferface for AC in the demographics is one way only. Example, if you enter a new pt in AC it does not go to Caretracker. If you enter a patient in Caretracker then it sends this information to AC. Caretracker was able to help us get the names and demographics imported. We have had some duplicate charts because things were not exactly the same in AC as Caretracker. Overall, it has saved some time for the billing person and is nice to have her in house not paying the going rate for collections and someone local to answer questions for the patients. Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Anyone come up with any other options, seems like Caretracker keeps going up (I know everything is going up). They are now penalizing for not migrating to a different clearinghouse. I read an email about it a while back but forgot to check into it and see what needed to be done. I would have thought if they were changing a clearing house then they would have changed the payers but I am no biller. I checked with Caretracker and sounds like they are going to charge a penalty even if we are able to get this changed before the end of the year. Does not say how long the penalty will last or if it can be corrected. But they did say they could fix it for me for $250 per hour! No estimate on how many hours they think it will take.

I use TotalMD. It has an HL7 interface with AC. It can go both ways but I set it to AC into TMD only. Once it's set up and you understand the kinks, it's been seamless. (For example, the insurance address has to match perfectly, otherwise duplicate insurances will be created.) We bought the software version years ago so I don't remember the cost. But now, we are on a $139/month plan that includes upgrades and support. This doesn't include the clearinghouse. For that we use Availity and it's $213/month (I have advanced claims editing features).

Thanks Serene! I will look into this program. May need to take a road trip to Houston and see how it works!

I am frustrated with Caretracker. We went from them saying we have 3 insurance companies we need to update to now 9! The kicker is the person that says there is now 9 was the same person 2 days ago that sent the list saying there was only 3. Two of the 3 she sent the other day were completed back in January of this year and sent to them but they don't have that info. I do have one representative that is working well with us and is very open but the person she has to refer us to for fixing this problem (same person from 3 to 9 insurances) is no very forthcoming in her answers.

So just had time to look at the invoice for Caretracker PM/Billing:

AC Caretracker PM $349 per month (one provider)
AC Caretracker PM Claims Manager $80 per month
Statements $0.81 per statement
Additional pages $0.11 per page needed
Add on Address changes $0.72 per statement but yet we still get some of these back....to fix....not sure how this part of the service really works

Availity seems to be included with the above because we do not have to pay extra for this service. I don't see a pricing schedule on the Availity website.

Feel free to message me if you want to see how it works!

Do you use the Credit card processor affiliated with TotalMD?

No, I use Square. Unfortunately, no direct link w/ TMD. We enter the payments manually. We are low volume so Square was the best option for cc since they have no monthly fees.

Still working on getting the clearinghouse issue corrected.

Harris/Caretracker has no record of us sending the information in January and February, although it is the same email we are using today.

Instructions are not very clear, was told this morning that one form had not been completed because we had not signed it and sent it back but there is no signature line on the form.

One of the insurances they had us needing to move over doesn't even pay us because we are not in network

Keep getting the same instructions sent back even though we have completed the steps and being told they are still missing information. Reminds me of some of the self update instructions from AC in the past where an important detail was left out and we could never get the update to work.

One insurance portal will not work and let my office staff in to change the information.

Weird thing is we signed on with Caretracker AFTER they had made the decision to have their own Clearinghouse and not the one we were signed up with at the time of enrollment!!!!!