At Stephens & Associates
we realize that you, our clients, are our most valuable resource.
In fact Stephens & Associates has enjoyed great growth over
the last decade almost solely due to recommendations from our
current
clients. Our clients have shown their appreciation for our level
of service by frequently recommending us to their friends and
colleagues, knowing that they can count on us to provide their
friends with the
same extraordinary service and knowledge that they have enjoyed
over the years. Well, we here at Stephens & Associates believe
it is time to start showing you just how much we appreciate those
recommendations!
Now not only can you have the satisfaction of knowing anyone
you recommend to us will be in capable and caring hands, but
you will
also be rewarded for your patronage with up to $200 cold, hard
cash. And even more, we will extend the same courtesy to whomever
you recommend
to us. That’s correct; we are giving away up to $400 simply
to say THANK YOU for referring new clients to us! For full details
of this program, visit our website
and check out the Specials link, or call
805-650-6128 extension 123 for details.
A (Sad) Tale of Two Disk Crashes
Few words strike such fear in the hearts
of those of us whose livelihood depends on the use of the PC—that
ubiquitous hunk of plastic and metal and electronics, and the hard
disk drive.
Yes, the crash of a hard drive is a calamity of major proportions,
causing untold disruption of work, and costing businesses thousands
of dollars in lost time and lost data that is often irreplaceable.
So here’s a little
story: Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones both had practices. Both were pretty
well computerized with computer
systems they had purchased at about the same time. One day in the
cafeteria of the local hospital, Dr. Smith was relating to Dr. Jones
the sad experience he had just gone through. One day his computer’s
hard disk drive had simply stopped! No amount of rebooting could
get it started again. He took the computer to his local computer
service center, only to be told that the disk had “crashed,” and
that he should get a new hard disk, and reload all of his software
(which he could do, because he had wisely kept the original software
disks), and restore his data from his backups. There was only one
small problem. Yep. You guessed it. He did not have a recent backup.
His latest backup was two months old. But at least he had a backup!
He had shuttered to think how much worse it could have been if he
didn’t have any backup at all! As it was he had to pay to have
all his superbills re-entered for that missing two months, and re-posting
insurance checks and patient payments and adjustments. He figured
he was out several thousand dollars. Dr. Jones commiserated with
his friend, and made a mental note to make sure that his staff was
using their zip drives to make daily backups to zip disks, and remove
them off-site at the end of the day. And it was a good thing for
her that she did, for about six months after that conversation in
the cafeteria Dr. Jones also experienced a hard disk crash. The difference
was: she had a backup of all her data done the night before. Like
Dr. Smith she still had the expense of purchasing a new hard disk,
loading the software back on, but only 1 day of replacing the records
that
had been entered since her last backup.
While this was admittedly a fictional
story, was it an unlikely story? Not really! It’s axiomatic for computer
professionals, that sooner or later, everyone will experience a hard
disk crash. It’s not a question of “if.” It’s
a question of when! Now there are services that can recover almost
all data from a crashed hard drive—even one that has been through
a fire! But it isn’t easy, cheap, or fast! And why put yourself
through all that when there’s such a simple, inexpensive method
of protecting yourself, not just from hard drive failures, but also
from data corruption, virus attacks, from theft, fire, pestilence—well,
maybe not pestilence, but certainly such other disasters as earthquakes,
tornadoes, etc. That method is, of course, (You knew it!) backups!
The preferred type of backup system
uses separate media like zip or optical disks, or magnetic tapes,
which can be
removed, off site
to protect against the possibility of fire or other natural or human
disasters. Backups are done daily of all data, including important
documents. A weekly backup is also made on the last day of the week
on two separate media that are rotated each week. (One week you backup
to Weekly Media #1, and the next week to Weekly Media #2.) Not backing
up to a single media over and over is important for two good reasons:
First, if you experience data corruption (and a surprising number
of offices do!), you won’t always discover it the very next
day. Sometimes it may be a week or more. In the meantime if you have
been using only one media, that one good backup done a week
ago has long since been overwritten and is no longer available, and
secondly because of the possibility that a single media might be
unreadable when you go to restore.
Everyone either knows (or suspects) that they’re supposed
to do backups, yet somehow they don’t always get done, or if
they do, they are very spasmodic. It doesn’t have to be hard,
or costly. For less than a couple hundred dollars, you can protect
yourself against all those above-mentioned calamities. That’s
cheap insurance! So if you have a backup system, use it! If you don’t
have a backup system, or would like more information about doing
backups, visit our website’s Support link and read the full
article on Backups.
Billing Electronically for Multiple Providers with the Validator
and Lytec
The Validator program was designed to
process claims electronically as flexibly as possible. Part of
this goal was to
be achieved by allowing you to append multiple claim files together,
and process them all as one big batch. This allows a single submitter
to send claims for multiple practices, and/or providers or groups
to the same carrier in one claim file. The first provider’s
files would be created as you normally do, and subsequent provider’s
claims would be appended to the first file. The Validator would then
process the entire file. The Validator program excels at doing this,
but there is one “gotcha” that you should be aware of:
We had one of our clients call us up because claims sent in one
of these appended files were being paid to the wrong provider. After
investigating the issue further we discovered that the GROUP number
for one of their practices was also in the insurance file of the
other practice. This can happen if you create a new practice, then
copy the insurance file from one practice to another, as the group
numbers are stored in the Insurance File. To understand why this
caused patients to be assigned to the wrong provider, we need to
understand a little better how the Validator prepares a file to be
sent to a carrier.
When a claim file first enters the Validator program,
there is a provider “record” associated with every single claim,
as that is the way Lytec prepares the file. This means if you have
52 claims, you have 52 providers in the file, most likely all the
same person. One of the requirements for a HIPAA-compliant ANSI file,
however, is that we remove any redundant information, thus creating
the smallest possible file size to send to a carrier. The Validator
takes the information from the first provider, chiefly the provider
Insurance ID or Group Number, and associates that number with that
provider. Then, when the Validator runs into that same ID again,
we know that is the same provider, and remove the redundant provider
record. (This is for Billing or Pay To Providers. The Rendering Providers,
if sent, are allowed to repeat). Since provider number 2, in our
unfortunate client’s situation, had been inappropriately given
the same number as provider number one, we removed provider number
two as a redundant provider, and all claims got associated with provider
number 1.
The moral of the story is, while this case is extremely rare, you
should be very conscious of which numbers you have in your practice
management program files, and make sure they are the correct ones.
