All, Here is the link and information promised on the call. Uversa. Uversa is committed to releasing GPL medical software. http://www.uversainc.com
ClearHealth. ClearHealth is our EHR and practice management system, we have focused on good web-gui interfaces which may be useful to VistA Here is the ClearHealth project http://www.clear-health.org Here is the commercial support page http://www.clear-health.com FreeB. FreeB is the worlds first (and as far as I know) only GPL medical billing engine. FreeB is designed to address the formatting and bill tracking issue, which I will describe more later. http://freeb.org For a good summary of who I am, what I think about billing and the billing problem in general, you can read the interview that I did with Ignacio on LinuxMedNews. http://www.linuxmednews.com/1113401258/index_html That was a while ago. But most of it is still relevant. I am pretty decidedly a Free Software guy personally and you can read more about that on my site http://www.gplmedicine.org Now I wish to broach discussion on two issues. The first is what defines a second generation billing engine, and the second regarding a web scheduling system. Billing is not just a matter of correcting the right forms. Payers, especially government payers, require different version of standard forms. A good billing engine should be capable of tracking these differences, which I call payer format variance. FreeB handles this by using a template engine for its formats. There will soon be an online repository of formats and their associated payers (this will be indexed by the forthcoming national payer numbering system). FreeB users, when they attempt to interface with a new payer will check to see if a format variation has been uploaded to this site for that payer. If such a preexisting format is in the repository, then the FreeB user will use that format variation. If not then the FreeB user will modify the base template for that payer, and hopefully upload it to the repository for others to use. This is in my mind the right way to handle payer format variance. The other kind of variance in claims is over the life of the claim. For instance I send a claim, the payer rejects it for reason X, then I modify the claim, and resend and the payer rejects for reason Y and then I fix it. This generates three versions of the same claim, Version-Original, version-X, and version-Y. FreeB supports a simple claim revision control system that tracks the changes to claims, in the future (already funded work) it will track comments and display the dates different events occurred. This models the process of going after money and getting it. It needs to have an a good AR behind it, and if it has that, it supports multiple payers and all kinds of other billing strangeness. The last thing that a third generation billing system should do is to interface with certain targets. Targets can be ClearingHouses, form feed printers, text files, pdf files, laser printers... you name it. Part of the problem of designing a medical billing engine is that it has to work for everyone. A single family doctor would probably prefer to print to a pdf and use a laser printer to do his paper billing, while a hospital might require an entire room of form-feed papers to generate hunderds of form-feed UB-92s. So everyone has different needs. Part of what FreeB is doing is acknowledging how different billing needs are and to make a architecture that addresses those needs through simpl configuration rather than programming. To take a look at the current version of FreeB, take a look at the following demo. http://demo.uversainc.com/clearhealth/ Everything listed under the Billing menu is FreeB. Also take note of the calendaring system. This is a web-based calendar that we would like to offer to the VistA community. We have funded work to research and develop a web-based drag and drop calendar using AJAX. (the technology that makes google maps so powerful) Please take a moment and reply to this note and tell me if you are interested in working with either a FreeB integration and or a scheduling integration and why/how. Please also speak up if you are familiar with the current VistA billing engine and understand how we might work with it... Regards, -- Fred Trotter, Uversa cell:(480)252-1981 landline:(480)839-0907 http://www.fredtrotter.com http://www.uversainc.com ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members