MedLook Weekly Tip For 02/25/2006

Some of the additional filters for patient batch billing are really handy in certain situations.  For instance, New Transactions Only is great when you want to bill only those patients who have transactions that have never been billed.  This is very similar to billing insurance for Unsubmitted Charges Only.  Check this option to enable this filter.  If you are re-billing then you do not want to check this option.

Checking the Auto Billing Turned Off option will cause the next set of statements to ignore the auto billing flag entirely.  This means even those patients that have their auto billing flag set to "no" will be included in the next set of statement generation (pending all other conditions).

Setting the Patients Not Billed Since date field allows you to explicitly include patients who have outstanding balances and have not been billed since the specified date.  This is really handy for billing patients that owe money that you have recently billed.

Setting the No Payments Since date field will include accounts that have a patient balance due and there has been no payment received since the specified date.

These two options, Patients Not Billed Since and No Payments Since, need to be used carefully and with serious consideration.  What they allow is for some special case situations.  For instance, if you have a patient that pays $10/month and they'll be doing this for the next 20 years and they are faithfully making the payment, then sending them a monthly statement is not good economics.  A statement that cost over $2/month is not worth sending to such a patient as it is a significant percentage of the amount received.  So you may send them only one statement per year as long as they are making their monthly payment.  So if you bill them at the beginning of the year just set the first option to Jan 1 and the second option to 30 days back from the current date and a bill will not be generated unless they miss a payment.

The Patient Status option allows you to include all patients or only patients with a certain specified status.  By default there are two types of status values:  Active and Inactive.  An Inactive status is usually used to denote accounts that are old or otherwise not worth billing any longer (for deceased patients, collections, etc.).  You can create as many status values as you wish and filter on them as appropriate.

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