MedLook Weekly Tip For 08/22/2005

The Aging Balances Report provides a wealth of information regarding the financial status of your patient database. There are three basic types of reports that can be generated: 1) Outstanding Balances, 2) Late Payments, and 3) Overpaid accounts. Each of these reports can optionally show the insurance carrier mnemonic and the phone number. The reports can be generated for all patients, only those with insurance, all those without insurance, and can also be restricted to only those patients listed as "active" or it can disregard the "active" status altogether. The reports can also be grouped by doctor or referral source.

The report contains a section per patient. Each section include the patient name, account #, primary and secondary insurance, date of last (DOL) payment and the amount paid, home and work phone numbers, the doctor, the last billing date, and a flag to indicate if auto billing is on or off. The financial information contains the aging line computed at the time the report is generated for each 30 day period up to and beyond the 120 day time frame. Any unassigned payments are shown along with the total balance of the account.

If the report was selected to be grouped by doctor or referral then totals are given for each section grouped. A grand total is also presented.

The Outstanding Balances report can be filtered to all accounts or those with outstanding balances over 30, 60, 90, or 120 days.

The Late Payment report can be filtered to accounts over due by at least 30, 60, 90, or 120 days.

The Overpaid report selects all accounts where the balance is negative (i.e. the total of the payments and credits exceeds the charges and debits). Generally this will be a shorter listing than the other reports.

In any case the financial information for these reports is computed at the time the report is generated. The totals are computed directly from the patient transactions including ALL of the transactions in the database for all patients. This is an important feature as there are no stored, intermediate values that may become invalidated as transactions are edited or deleted over time.

Using these reports you can systematically address your accounts and hopefully secure the money you earned through the service you have given your patients.

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