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
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