To do a part-paid patient claim, make sure the patient's account has the "Use Medicare Online" tick on, and then click cash consultation.
You can do a gap consultation (i.e. the difference between the charge and the expected rebate), by ticking "Gap Consultation" in the billing screen. Then when you click OK and it goes to the payment screen, the gap will be the outstanding amount.
If you want to charge some other part payment amount, leave the gap consultation tick off, (i.e. as if you were fully charging), but then in the payment screen just type the amount they are paying, and then tick "Patient Contrbution".
Whichever way you do it, it leaves an outstanding amount on the patient's file, so you will later have to go in to the Receipt screen to pay that off, using the rebate and/or additional payments from the patient.
This rebate comes in the form of a cheque that is addressed to the payee provider, but sent via the patient. The idea is then that the patient brings that in to 'pay' for the outstanding amount on their file. If the patient doesn't bring it in in 90 days it gets automatically deposited, but unfortunately there is no ability for software developers to obtain reporting on this.
This rebate payment via cheque is not ideal, and we strongly recommend doing the fully paid claim method instead. While it does cost the patient more upfront, they get the rebate back pretty much instantly. Whereas with the part paid/unpaid method impacts your business cash-flow, and is more labour intensive to keep track of/reconcile.
We know some practices want to look after specific patients due to financial hardship. Another option would be to bulk bill those patients.