The French National Day was celebrated yesterday, July 14, to commemorate the beginning of the French Revolution with the Storming of the Bastille. This is why it is often referred to as Bastille Day in English speaking countries.

So in honor of the French Revolution, let’s take time to appreciate the revolutions in healthcare billing workflow. 

 

Before the development of medical billing software:

 

Patient scheduling was done in those yearly appointment books.  You had to flip forwards, and back again, searching around for open slots.  Erasing cancellations and making changes, UGH.

 

When a patient arrived for their appointment, you would copy the insurance card and call the payer, maneuvering through the phone menu,attempting to speak to a human so that you could verify the coverage.  What a major time suck!

 

Medical office staffs sat surrounded by stacks of papers and charts.  They were forced to manually transfer charge items from those old- style hand written ledger cards or super bill slips onto paper claim forms for submission to payers.  I am guessing this caused more than one of those very painful paper cuts!

 

All insurance payments were paper checks accompanied by even more stacks of paper for the explanation of benefits.  The information on those EOB’s had to be posted onto those ledger cards and you better have your adding machine/calculator handy to figure your patient balances. Staring at all those figures, caused lots of need for eyeglasses I bet!

Once you had your patient balances, you got to plant yourself back in front of your typewriter and made your patient statements.  Can you say “Carpel Tunnel’?

Iridium Suite Practice Management Software

took the revolution one step further:

With an integrated scheduler, Iridium Suite can help you forget about those days of using those yearly appointment books.  Its advanced functionality for therapy type specialties allows the ease of scheduling of recurrent appointments with a simple click of the mouse.

 

The built-in real time eligibility (RTE) function provides the ability to check coverage and benefits right from the billing system and then the user can create the patient demographics and insurance information directly from the response within seconds.

One of the most unique features allows the direct import of patient demographic and charge data directly from any electronic health record (EHR).  The specialized “Connectivity Clearinghouse” utilizes HL7 standards to make this magic happen.

 

Our relationship with the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH) ensures hundreds of payers can receive your 837 electronic claims as well as the receipt of the standard 835 electronic remittance advices (ERAs).  Almost all information received in the ERA files can be auto-adjudicated by the medical billing system without any user intervention.  The ACH offers a patient mailing service that is both economical and a time saving tool for your office staff.

If you are like me, you probably relate the quote: "Let them eat cake" to the French Revolution.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I know better.  But, I would like to say this to those long-time medical billers: “Let’s eat cake and celebrate the revolutions brought to us by medical billing software! (Don’t forget to check out https://iridiumsuite.com//.)”