If you see a section of an invoice highlighted with an error message, it means it won’t meet the insurer’s validation criteria. Find out how you can amend the invoice and submit it successfully through the Clearing Service.   

Go to our guide to invoice errors in ePractice and how to fix them: 

• Identify the error and what it means
• Find out what you can do to resolve the issue  

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If you’re still stuck and need more help, get in touch with one of our friendly team.

The post Fix an invoice error in ePractice appeared first on Healthcode.

Find out whether the invoice you’ve submitted through the Clearing Service has been validated, is awaiting collection or successfully submitted.

Put your mind at rest by following these simple steps:

• Click the Account tab in Patient Details
• Check the boxes in the Status column to see what’s happened to your invoice  

 1 green box means the invoice has been validated and is ready to go to the insurer

 2 green boxes mean it’s waiting to be collected by the insurer

 3 green boxes mean it’s been successfully submitted (the date and time the insurer collected it is also displayed)

1 red box means the invoice has failed validation and needs to be corrected

3 red boxes mean it’s been cancelled

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See more articles on ePractice in Help and Support or sign up for a free online tutorial with Healthcode Academy. If you need more help, get in touch with one of our friendly team.

The post Check the status of your electronic invoices to insurers in ePractice appeared first on Healthcode.

Unfortunately, this error might’ve happened at several points in the invoicing, payment or reconciliation process. Perhaps a paper invoice was raised for a self-pay patient and incorrectly recorded, an insurer’s bulk payment could have been wrongly allocated, or maybe a shortfall was missed.

These problems are more likely when practices are trying to manage and reconcile different systems and processes. Whenever you re-enter data manually onto another system, it increases the chance that inaccuracies will creep in, making it harder to balance the books. Such duplication also takes up valuable time and diverts members of your team from more productive tasks.

With an integrated invoicing and payment system, you’ll have a single, consistent source of truth about your finances at each stage in the invoicing cycle so you can see at a glance what you’ve invoiced, what’s been paid and what’s outstanding. This is essential for running your practice day-to-day but it also means you have the data required to plan ahead and make informed business decisions.

ePractice Lite and Pro give you the tools you need to manage your practice finances efficiently, starting with accurate invoicing with help from unique features like our Pricing Matrix and Membership Enquiry. You can then send electronic invoices securely to both insurers and self-pay patients from one place thanks to the seamless integration with the Clearing Service and Online Payments solution with insurer invoices automatically validated so they enter the payment cycle on receipt.

Once you’ve submitted your invoices, the payment allocation and debt reallocation features help you keep on top of bulk payments, shortfalls and other credit control tasks without swallowing up time and resource. You can even automate this process with our Electronic Remittances service with participating insurers and Online Payments.

Finally, you have complete oversight of your practice’s current financial position with access to real-time financial reporting options which can be easily exported to other software for accounting purposes.

If the scenario at the start of the blog sounds familiar, we recommend you audit the strengths and weaknesses of your back-office set-up. Ask yourself:

• How much manual intervention and duplication of effort is required?
• How much time do my team spend detecting and correcting errors?
• Can I get an accurate view of our current financial position?
• Will it support or hinder your practice as it grows?
• Is there scope for improved automation of some of the practice’s accounting tasks?
• Could I save money and increase productivity?

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Find out how to keep track of your finances by signing up for our free Electronic billing & collection | Module 3 online tutorial with the Healthcode Academy’s team of Service Delivery Associates. They’ll guide you using your own data to make the training as relevant as possible.

To find out more about upgrading to an integrated and secure system, contact our Business Development team or book a demo to discover how ePractice can transform the way you work.

The post Why you need a single source of truth appeared first on Healthcode.

Recent surveys show how important the self-pay market is to the sector. YouGov found that 13% of British people had personally paid for private healthcare services in the previous year – most using disposable income or savings – and LaingBuisson’s research found that 53% of respondents believed the self-pay market would grow by 10-15% in the next three years.

If you want to embrace this opportunity, you’ll need our online invoicing and payment service. This is more efficient, cost-effective and secure than alternatives like printing and posting paper invoices, sending unencrypted emails, or paying for a merchant account with card processing fees. You won’t pay any transactional Clearing Service charges but will pay patientzone a transaction fee of 2.5% per paid invoice (+ VAT) and a charge of 10p (+VAT) for each reminder letter sent.

It’s a convenient option for your patients too, ensuring their episode of private care ends on a positive note. Your co-branded collection notice or reminders are sent by email or text with a unique link so they can access the secure patientzone website and pay what’s due. They’ll receive an electronic receipt and you’ll get confirmation as soon as the invoice is settled.

After our Clearing Service paved the way for the private healthcare sector to adopt electronic invoicing for insurers, we now want to support this transition in the growing self-pay sector through our ongoing partnership with patientzone.

Want to know more?

To find out how our online payment solution can help you manage your self-pay invoices, contact our Business Development team.  

The post An effortless way to invoice self-pay patients appeared first on Healthcode.

Schoen Clinic’s Orthopaedic & Spinal Hospital in central London has achieved deserved recognition as a centre of excellence for treating musculoskeletal conditions and sports injuries. In addition to winning Hospital of the Year in 2019 at the LaingBuisson Awards, it was a finalist in 2021 and is part of an award-winning international group which treats more than 300,000 patients each year.   

With world class facilities including a high dependency unit, three operating theatres and a state-of-the-art imaging department, Schoen Clinic London provides the entire treatment pathway, including diagnosis, non-surgical and surgical treatments and rehabilitation. As well as self-funded patients and GP referrals, the hospital is one of a select number in the Healthcare Purchasing Alliance (HPA) which buys complete packages of care on behalf of Aviva and Vitality Health.

To maintain Schoen Clinic’s high standards, it’s important that the back-office admin is managed as effectively as the delivery of specialist care. Finance and Revenue Assurance Manager, Henry Muscatt, oversees this aspect of the business but says it would be virtually impossible without Healthcode services including pre-authorisation, membership enquiry and online invoicing.

“We’ve been using Healthcode since we opened in August 2018,” he says. “Overall, they’re fantastic and there simply isn’t anyone else that can do what they do. Submitting all our invoices manually, for example, would be a full-time job whereas we can raise them in-house, and submit them as XML files online. The whole process flows really well and it works for everyone: the insurers get the bill sooner; we get paid sooner; and our patients have peace of mind that the invoice has gone through and been sorted.”

The simplicity of electronic invoicing means Henry can focus on ensuring invoices are accurate and validated first time. Again, we’ve been the ideal support.

Henry explains: “When patients are referred by HPA (Aviva & Vitality), we use the online pre-authorisation service to obtain the data for that episode of care such as consultant, authorisation number, policy number and the patient’s name and date of birth. It’s really useful as it minimises how much information we have to get directly from patients and provides another layer of security as we have the correct details from the beginning.”

If Henry and his team don’t have an insured patient’s membership number, they use our Membership Enquiry service which checks their demographic details against the relevant insurer database. “Sometimes the number has been taken down wrong or it’s slightly out of date,” he says. “When this happens, I ask the admin team to use Healthcode’s Membership Enquiry service. Although it doesn’t always find a match, the service is straightforward to use: you just type in the patient’s details, hit refresh and the results are virtually instant. When we don’t have a valid membership number for the patient, we reach out to them directly but this can be a time-consuming process.”

“When an invoice doesn’t go through, it’s mostly because of a problem with the patient’s membership details although sometimes it can be a coding issue such as where a prosthesis isn’t mapped to an insurer. When this happens, I contact Healthcode’s Coding team who are really good,” says Henry.

Thanks to the performance dashboard on its account, Henry can see that around 80% of Schoen’s electronic invoices are validated first time, slightly higher than the industry average. However, Henry has a more ambitious target of 95% in mind and is keen to work with us to make this a reality. “I’d recommend hospitals use Healthcode services,” he concludes. “In fact, if a new hospital started up and they decided not to use them, I think they’d be in trouble!”

The post “The whole process flows really well and it works for everyone” – Henry Muscatt, Schoen Clinic appeared first on Healthcode.

While few practitioners have experience of running a business, the most successful are those who draw on the time management skills they learned early in their professional career. By identifying ways to work smarter and making the most of the latest practice management technology, they’ve been able to ‘steal back’ time to focus on patients and develop their practice.

Every practice has time-consuming tasks that could be managed more effectively, often by making better use of technology. Here are five of the most common admin ‘bottlenecks’ to address:

• Correspondence – Medical secretaries can spend their time typing, printing and dispatching letters to keep patients and their GPs informed about appointments, investigations and treatments. Streamline the process by using letter templates for common subjects which can be completed with the relevant patient details. Our ePractice Lite and Pro software also allows you to select and batch print multiple documents at a time.
• Patient insurance cover – Practices regularly need to call hospitals or insurers to confirm a patient’s insurance details, but this can be a time-consuming – and sometimes a frustrating – exercise. Our online membership enquiry feature enables you to instantly check patients’ policy numbers and address details against the insurers’ database.
• Invoicing – Electronic invoicing and clearing can save you money by eliminating printing, postage and manpower costs. Creating and submitting invoices to insurers – via our encrypted, secure service – takes a fraction of the time, improves accuracy and ensures the invoice is validated against the relevant insurer criteria – so it’s ready for processing and payment. This secure platform eliminates the risk of data breaches possible when sending invoices by post or email, plus you have the additional reassurance of knowing the invoice has been received by the insurer.
• Payment tracking – When payments arrive, every practice needs a system to record exactly what invoices are being paid and identify shortfalls. This can be time-consuming with a manual system and in some cases, practices have been obliged to write-off outstanding debts because payments have not been reconciled against the correct invoice. Our payment tracking tools will help you save time and money.
• Financial reports – Without access to accurate information it’s impossible to steer your business effectively. However, manual bookkeeping and accounting systems require expertise and time to prepare even basic reports such as an aged debtor analysis. Your practice management system should provide a range of real-time financial reports, so you can measure your performance, analyse your strengths and weaknesses and make informed decisions.

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Find out how ePractice Lite and Pro can help streamline your processes and avoid a bottleneck of admin tasks with the Healthcode Academy’s team of Service Delivery Associates. They’ll guide you using your own data to make the training as relevant as possible.

Discover what else you can do in ePractice by checking out our comprehensive  Help and Support articles.

To find out more about this or any other feature of ePractice Lite or Pro contact our Business Development team.

The post Working smarter with technology appeared first on Healthcode.

By validating each invoice in line with the criteria set by each insurer, we ensure they’re ready for processing and payment on receipt. More efficient all round. But sometimes invoices fail the process and need submitting again. When this happens during your invoicing run, it’s important to know exactly what’s gone wrong, how to correct it and hopefully prevent it recurring.

Our Premium level Financial Management Solutions for hospitals include the clever Failed Bills Management Tools to help you identify and fix issues in failed invoices, from one-off inaccuracies to persistent coding errors. By increasing accuracy and efficiency, you’ll quickly see improvements in your invoicing success rate. In fact, when we reviewed monthly failed invoice volumes over a twelve-month period, we found those on the Premium package had 42% fewer recurring failed invoices compared with those using the Standard package.

Our Premium package includes:

• Failed Bills Management Workflow which shows, at a glance, how many invoices have failed, categorised by reason. You don’t have to spend time opening and reviewing each invoice.  
• The ability to apply bulk fixes when an issue has affected multiple invoices and reprocess these at the same time.
• Filters to aid quick analysis. For example, you can focus on invoices to a particular insurer or zero in on failed charge lines within an invoice.
• Colour coded invoice categories – create and assign a colour to different invoice categories for better visibility and manage work flow.
• Failure Analysis Reports are available to increase visibility and manageability of the error handling process. This will help you to correct any issue within your patient administration system and resubmit the invoice.

Want to know more?

To find out how our tools can help you submit fully validated invoices to the insurers efficiently and improve your cash flow, contact our Business Development team.

The post Our invoicing tools point the way to success appeared first on Healthcode.

As you raise invoices on a third-party practice management system and submit them through our Clearing Service using VEDA, here’s our guide to the most common error messages. We’ve also given you some simple tips on how to quickly resolve them.

Access Denied

What this means: You haven’t set up a Clearing Service subscription.

What you can do:

• Log into your Healthcode Account and go to your VEDA site. Select “Manage Subscription” to set up your direct debit payment. More information on how to do this can be found here for practitioners and here for practices and clinics.
• If you’re unable to access your account, you can request a payment link to be sent from the Customer Services team to set up the direct debit.

Invalid User Name/Password

What this means: The incorrect details / password have been entered into the third-party system.

What you can do:

• Contact our Customer Services team. It’ll help us resolve the issue more quickly if you have your welcome email from the Registrations team to hand.
• Speak to your own system vendor.

Payee Provider – Must be M

What this means: The practitioner isn’t set up as a payee provider (who gets paid directly by the insurer) and we don’t have consent to process these invoices.

What you can do:

• Request, complete and return a data processing consent form through Customer Services.

Hospital not mapped

What this means: The treatment location hasn’t been mapped (added) to your site. In rare cases, it may be because an insurer doesn’t recognise a particular treatment location.

What you can do:

• Contact Customer Services with the name and address of the treatment location, along with a user ID / Site ID for mapping.

Treatment setting must be I, O or D

What this means: The invoice has the incorrect service setting for the treatment/procedure. For example, heart surgery couldn’t take place in a consulting room and would need to be at an inpatient care facility like a hospital.

What you can do:

• Select the correct treatment setting on the invoice. These are: I= Inpatient O= Outpatient D= Day case.

Need more support?

If you need further help with invoice errors and how to resolve them, contact our Customer Services team

The post Clearing up common error messages | VEDA appeared first on Healthcode.

Healthcode’s reply: No, you don’t as invoice auto-population enables practitioners (who are recognised as controlling specialists) to generate an invoice with the correct patient and episode fields completed, including the patient’s GP, insurer, membership number and the diagnosis and procedure codes used by the hospital. Anaesthetists and radiologists can also use this feature for episodes where they provided care and are linked to the controlling specialist.
All you need to do is add your own fee which you can do with one click if you use our pricing matrix feature. 
This feature is only available to ePractice Lite or Pro users.

Quick guide

• Check your status page for a list of all the patients where invoices have been sent by the hospital showing you as “controlling specialist” (surgeons only).
• Anaesthetists and radiologists will need to enter the patient’s last name, date of birth, treatment date and hospital in the search box.
• Select the patient you want to invoice.
• Check details from the hospital invoice, including patient, GP, primary diagnosis and procedure.
• Complete the fields for service dates and fee.
• Click Service type and select an option from the dropdown menu.
• Complete invoice by clicking save and send.

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If you’re interested in finding out more about ePractice Lite or Pro why not book a demo with our Business Development team.

Learn more about invoice auto-population and other time-saving ePractice features by signing up for our free online tutorials with the Healthcode Academy. The Academy’s Service Delivery Associates will guide you through our series of short, personalised training sessions, using your own data to make the training as relevant as possible.

We offer a one-hour billing module – Electronic billing & collection | Module 2 – that takes you through everything to do with invoicing. For those who just want to focus on invoice auto-population, we offer a bite-size option – you’ll need module 2A.

The post Have you tried…invoice auto population? appeared first on Healthcode.