Accounting Screen » File » Change Details » Item Numbers
Add, Edit and Update Fees for Medicare, DVA, Funds and Third Parties for billing purposes.
Before you can bill you need to configure your item numbers. We suggest that you only add the items that you will use in to your system as this gives you much tighter control over what staff can bill and the fees that you have to manually set rates for.
From here you can add/edit/deactivate (but not delete) item numbers.
If you go to the Item Fees screen, you will see that items have all sorts of rates. For example, if you had an item 12345, you might want to charge $100 for most patients, or $80 for discount patients. You would then set up the 'u' rate to be $100, and the 'd' rate to be $80.
If you are adding/editing an item you must fill in an item number, brief description and a rate (we suggest the U column). There are some considerations to take regarding the column rates:
- For private invoicing you can charge whatever amount you like, but the U column will be the default unless another default specified in the patient setup.
- For Medicare/DVA invoicing by default it will be the H/M/S/V/L/R column(s). These are special columns, do not set them manually unless you are sure of the rate, as the fee updater will overwrite these values anyway.
- Funds have their own agreement/scheme rates (for medical this is almost exclusively for in-patient services) often called No Gap or something to that effect. Historically some practices have manually used a specific letter to correspond to a fund, and just manually updated these. The preferred method however is to use the fund area to modify these rates, and that is where the fee updater will put these.
If you look at the Edit Patient screen, there is a section there to determine the Private Billing Rate. By default it's 'u', but you might set it to 'd' for patients who are eligible for discounts.
Later when you private bill the patients, you will notice that it picks up that 'u' or 'd' (or whatever) rate that you have set them to. For example, we set the above patient to 'd', so it's picking up $80 automatically, and when we press add we can set is actually (behind the scenes) adding a 'd' prefix to the item:
If you ever need to, you can manually add alternate letter prefixes when billing items. For example, if we typed 'u12345' it would bill $100.
The upside to doing things this way is that it's more or less automated - however it relies on you having set the patients up before hand (or manually typing in the prefix).
There is another way to do it which is to have a second version of your item. Practices sometimes do this for left and right versions of the same item, so that they can easily switch descriptions, but you can do the same thing for different amounts too. You just press Add and type it in again with a different description and/or amounts etc.
Then when billing, press the Next Desc button to switch to the next version of item 12345 - it will automatically pick up the description and rate for the other version of the item.