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Managed Care

Health Focus for practice management software

Creating scope in the practice

Managed care was introduced with the aim of controlling spiraling medical costs. However, managed care has its price - namely additional record keeping and cross referencing requirements.  As a result, a system, like Eminance, becomes an essential tool for the practice. Added with the fact that managed care limits which specialties, treatments and medicines a medical aid scheme will pay for, information management has become more critical than ever before.

The Eminance managed care capabilities provides you the necessary tools to control and monitor the managed care programs cost effectively and efficiently. Because managed care shifts the financial accountability to the provider, it forces the doctor to measure the actual risk. This is particularly true if the patient is on a capitated scheme. Health2000 offers these reports as standard features, allowing internal assessment of the risk and to determine the viability of the contract.

In addition, the risk analysis reports generated by Eminance can give you the information you require to negotiate profitable managed care contracts and track your capitated patients. 

Advantages
There are numerous advantages to using Eminance for managed care, simply because the process is automatic, once you have tagged the patient with the category or type of managed care. They include;
  • The ability to know your precise cost of care per patient
  • Minimize medical aid rejections due to no pre-authorization
  • Accurate statistics highlight cost warning indicators
  • Auto activation of MMAP prices reducing write off's
  • Automatic cross mapping of generics to medical aid patients linked to MMAP medical aids
  • Motivate, justify and verify your position when negotiating with medical aids
  • Easy identification of capped patients and usage by groups of patient types.
  • Improve your practice management by knowing your exact costs for treatments, medicines and materials
  • Accurately track treatment authorization requests by patient, medical aid, treatment or medicine.
  • Enhance your practice profitability and be fully prepared for external audits.
Authorizations

Eminance caters for managed care pre-authorization or authorizations on a number of levels. Each dependant can have their own authorization number for any period of time. In addition, a procedure, medicine or medical aid may always require an authorization. Simply tag the patient or authorization type, and if the authorization is not on file, the system will prompt you to enter the number. The number can then be printed on the statement, and if you are submitting the claim via EDI, the number will be automatically transmitted.

Capitation
When you embark on a capitation scheme, it is important to gauge whether the venture is economically viable. Eminance allows you to tag patients with a capitation limit, and to then bill the patients normally. At any time you can check the viability and cost per patient, or group of capitation patients. Eminance caters for both individual capitation or group capitation - along with fixed fee billing. It is a versatile system that caters for almost every managed care option - allowing you to monitor the movement. Capitation is supported for both the Vat receipts and invoice method, to ensure your accounting conforms to generally accepted accounting principals.
On the basis that you receive a fixed fee per patient for a period, you can post the payment against the patients account and inhibit any EDI transmission or statement run.  This gives you a more accurate picture of the costs involved, allowing you to make a more informed decision.
Care Levels
Detailed managed care data is essential to a practice in determining whether it is economically viable to continue on a managed care scheme.  Medical aids gamble that providers who are on managed care schemes can manage and care for their members for less money that what it currently costs them.  One of the strategies of managed care is that there will be shift away from expensive specialists to lower paid general practitioners.  This strategy regulates the use of high cost services, and at the same time gives the GP the incentive to provide more of the patients health care.  Patients normally choose their doctors from a list of doctors provided by the medical aids.  However, the practitioner must be able to ensure that the care levels are within the monetary range provided.  The program allows this monitoring by flagging a patient if their capitation has been exceeded, or if on another type of managed care program, via statistical reports.
Co-payments
Co-payments can be automatically generated per patient at the point of posting transactions.  While the program caters for all types of medical aid levies, a co-payment is the nominated difference between the scale of benefits amount and the fixed fee amount.  The program allows you to establish a procedure or treatment based on a fixed fee, and any amount in excess of that fixed fee automatically is for the patient account.
Eligibility
Without doubt, medical care management is  in a high risk category.  This risk starts from the minute the patient is entered onto the system, to the time that the account is rendered.  There are numerous events which contribute toward the risk - ranging from valid membership numbers through to eligibility schemes.  Because patients in a managed care plan can change frequently, it is essential to verify both the eligibility of the patient and the services covered.  The program caters for both these scenarios.  The first is via the  membership mask which pre-validates the membership number, while the latter is via the authorization and tagging system.  The medical aid levies allow you to exclude or include certain procedures and tariff codes from a specific medical aid.  Therefore it becomes easy to identify that a specific scheme will not pay (for example) a diving medical - and if that procedure is undertaken, that it would be for the patients account.
Formulary
Our program allows an unlimited amount of formularies and schemes.  In turn, each scheme can  link up to three formularies and each medicine apply to up to three formularies.  This ensures that a patient linked to a specific scheme is dispensed medicines from the formularies in the medicine files.    Once the medicines and schemes have been updated with the formulary, the process is fully automatic.  In addition, there is expensive reporting on the medicines dispensed within that formulary, along with key indicators such as profitability, movement and usage.
Referral To
One of the requirements of managed care is that pre-authorization must be in place before a patient is referred to a specialist for an expensive procedure, such as a CAT scan.  Some managed care companies have a system where pre-authorization is predetermined from an existing number list, provided that the referral is medically justified.  In both cases the program keeps track of the referrals and holds a complete doctor referral register.  Added with the fact that each patient can have a set diagnosis, reporting and auditing of the referrals becomes a easily managed task - very important since the risk is held in the practice.  Using the Eminance patient clinical notes, detailed reports can be kept on file and mail merged to the referring doctor.
Referral From
Specialists handling referrals have the ability to tag the patient as a referral and to generate reports based on incident reporting and referral rates.  Emphasis is placed on the authorization and membership number accuracy and the ability to extract reports based on these key indicators. 
Reporting
Managed care reports provide for an analysis of billings by category.  The usage's of managed care patients is integral to a successful system.  These include the ability to implement proper credit control, aged analysis by a specific managed care company, administrator or medical aid scheme and a medical aid profile, which allows you gauge the percentages and value per medical aid scheme.  As the reporting role will become clearer, so will Eminance change to adapt to your needs.
  • Total Patient Cost
  • Qty of medicines dispensed
  • Total Script value
  • Average treatment cost
  • Average patient cost
  • Qty Treatments
  • Average script value
  • Total material cost
  • Number of patients seen
  • Qty Materials used
  • Total treatment cost
  • Average material cost

 

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