I just wanted to briefly summarize the ground we've covered since July -
and when I say we - I mostly mean YOU, because you all have done a fantastic job
figuring out Therapist Helper for scheduling, billing, and demographics! I also
wanted to offer some thoughts for actual implementation.
Summary of Progress
Made
In the first two meetings or so, Agency staff did a needs analysis, took
a careful look at the current way the Agency does business, and came up with
a list of test scenarios and library setups to run through a Therapist Helper
test environment.. In setting up the test environment Agency staff learned that
there is a free upgrade to Therapist Helper and more online training - which
is available through Therapist Helper's paid support plan. Getting ahead of
myself a bit, I think it might be good for all Agency staff to review and take
any new training - now that they have had ample opportunity to explore and learn
about Therapist Helper on their own.
Getting back to the summary of progress made, Agency staff have been
tweaking and running test scenarios through Therapist Helper. In the debriefing
sessions, it has become clear that they have made significant progress in answering
many of their own questions and understanding how to make Therapist Helper work
for Agency billing and accounting. They clarified the Agency fee schedule for
the Therapist Helper Libraries. They have decided to have only two versions
of each service in their Service Library - one with the Agency standard fee
attached to it for self-pay and insurance clients, and one with a zero fee attached
to it for clients who are covered under a grant such as DFC or SOMM. The Agency
will use Therapist Helper to bill and track balances for the first group of
clients, and will export into Excel and attach fees there to bill the grants
for the second group of clients. By not maintaining the actual grant fees in
Therapist Helper, Agency staff will not have to individually apply back payments
when a mass grant payment is received. This would be a very time-consuming
task and one they currently do not have to do. The one exception to having two
versions for each service is the "No Show Fee" which the grants do not cover. It
should be added as further explanation, Agency staff have discovered that they
can export groups of charges to Excel by setting up the grants in Therapist
Helper's Account Library, attaching the Client's Face Sheet to the correct
grant in the Account Library, and then using Therapist Helper's reporting features
to filter out the clients based on Account.
Agency staff have made additional important breakthroughs such as discovering
how to add beginning balances (for when the system goes live) and how to have
Therapist Helper prompt for pre-authorization for different insurances such as
Medicare/Medicaid.
In a parallel initiative, Agency staff have made contact with Therapist
Helper's technical support and have been refining a list of questions to ask in
a conference call at some point in the future. Some of the questions are as
follows:
How do you get a self-defined ethnicity field to show up in reports and
exports?
Can Therapist Helper also prompt for when 90 Day Reports are due for
Medicare and Medicaid?
What is the difference between the Write-Off field and the Adjustments tab
in the Client's Face Sheet and which would be best to use for the sliding fee
scale?
Work that remains to be
done
J and D are to the point of writing up procedures for setting up the Client's
Face Sheet in Therapist Helper. Creating this type of Documentation is a very
important step. When they have finished, I can, if you all would like, review
it from an educational and instructional materials perspective for creating
job aids.
We need to clarify whether we can pull out all the information we need
based solely on Account, and leave the reponsible party fields to be used A
critical piece that still needs to happen is that Agency staff need to actually
create the various grant invoices from the Therapist Helper exports. There is a
two-fold purpose for this:
(1) Agency staff must see if they can pull all the information that they need
out of Therapist Helper and determine what all is involved in preparing a grant
invoice from a Therapist Helper export. A question that remains to be answered
is whether groups of charges can be exported solely on Account, leaving the
Responsible Party fields in the Face Sheet to be used as they were actually
intended. It's my opinion at this point that they can, but this needs to be
verified.
(2)The various granting agencies need to see the invoices and give feedback
as to what is acceptable to them. This negotiating may take some time so this
needs to be done soon, if we are looking at a January 1 implementation
date.
Looking ahead to implementation, we probably should develop a schedule for
implementation (I visualize this as another white-board, brain-storming meeting
initially) - and a very critical part of that schedule is installing
the Therapist Helper upgrade and allowing a time to go through training and to
"play with/test" the new version. Would it be possible to set up the upgrade in
a test environment before going live with it? Even if it's on a standalone
machine not connected to the network.
See you all on Thursday at 1p!
Jeanne