PCC Client Lobby

Recently on PedSource, we featured a three part series of articles to help pediatricians navigate the convoluted issue of how to qualify for EHR stimulus money. Now, we have compiled these articles in one easy-to-find location so that you can quickly find answers to the three central questions surrounding this issue:

Are You Eligible for ARRA Mone

Do You Need a Certified EHR

What is a Meaningful User of EHR?

We will continue to follow the discussions surrounding Meaningful
Use, Certification, and Medicaid money under ARRA to help you make informed decisions for your practice.

Partner Version 3.2010 is currently in beta and will begin rolling out over the next few weeks. This update to Partner improves the epidemic and curimms immunization tools. This release will also provide better claim status history, and a number of new features and improvements. Read the Partner 3.2010 Change Log to find out about changes coming your way.

Are you thinking about attending PCC's Pediatric Coding and Practice Management Conference this January 29 in Coral Gables, Florida? If so, register by December 29th and save $50 on the price of admission! Learn more and register!

PCC is now launching the Spring 2010 PCC EHR Version 1.1 Early Adopter Program. Only six offices will be admitted into the PCC EHR Early Adopter program. This program is exclusively available to PCC customers using Partner Practice Management System. Registration for the PCC EHR Early Adopter program will begin in January 2010. Your best bet for securing admission is to review PCC EHR ahead of time so all you need to do when registration opens is to sign up.

Learn more about what's included in the latest version of PCC EHR and read about the qualities your practice should have to participate. Your practice can be ready to decide whether being an Early Adopter is right for you by the time we begin accepting registrations in January.

Partner Version 10.2009 will be released in the coming weeks and your office will have access to a number of exciting new changes in Partner.

Autoposting and New Billing Features: Partner can now automatically post electronic EOBs, a process that could save your billing staff hundreds of hours. The autoposting process includes features for tracking and reviewing automated reimbursement, so you can easily work with those items that are not safe to autopost. We have also made adjustments across Partner to support CPT II billing codes, often used in Pay-for-Performance measures. Finally, we collected your responses to our new Insurance Allowables (Contract Fee Schedules) features and improved the tools.

Read more about improvements to Partner and share these changes with affected Partner users at your office.

With the shift toward electronic communications, there is a lot of misinformation and apprehension about implementing new technologies in many private pediatric practices. Partner's capabilities to receive Electronic Remittance Advice (electronic EOBs) and our efforts in coordinating with insurance companies helps to facilitate electronic communications. This, in turn, has many direct benefits to your practice–namely faster communication, the ability to search and store archival copies, and a standardized format among payers.

Receiving Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) and setting up an Electronic Fund Transfer with your payers will also allow your practice to begin using Partner's new "auto-pip" feature, which will allow you to automatically post insurance payments. To find out more about this new feature in Partner, attend one of three upcoming weblabs. First, we want to tell you a little more about ERA and EFT and how using these electronic communications can help your practice.

Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA)

Your PCC Partner Practice Management System can receive Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) from the following payers. ERA is an electronic EOB. Usually ERA is required if you want the payer to send payments to you electronically. It is also required if you wish to use Partner's auto-posting feature.

As a PCC client, you are eligible to receive ERA from participating payers at no extra cost to you in your PCC Care Plan. Some practices are concerned about not having as much control when they begin using electronic transactions with payers, but receiving ERA can actually give you more control and help you see how quickly insurance companies are getting back to you, as well as providing you with archival copies of your transactions.

In addition to receiving your EOBs faster, you can search through them much more easily when you receive them electronically. With ERA, you can search your transactions by claim number, keyword, patient's name, denial code, and more, saving you time and a lot of hassle. Additionally, there are a number payers that have discontinued sending paper EOBs, and if you do not participate in ERA, your practice is forced to download EOBs from the internet. Instead, you can have them imported directly to Partner when you sign up to receive ERA.

With the new feature of automatic posting of insurance checks (auto-pip) in Partner about to roll out the door this fall, ERA is a prerequisite to participate in this exciting new feature that will save your office time and money. Lastly, all PCC clients can participate in ERA absolutely FREE as part of your PCC Care Plan. Sign up to receive ERA now so that your practice is ready to begin automatically posting payments when this feature begins rolling out the door! If you are already using ERA, PCC is continually adding to our list of participating payers, so check back and see if there are new connections that will benefit your practice.

Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)

An Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) provides for electronic payments and collections that are directly deposited into a bank account rather than having to wait for a paper check. Receiving EFT often means that you get paid faster from insurance companies and streamlines your workflow, putting your time to more effective use. To sign up for EFT, you will need to contact your individual payers. Most of the time, payers require that you are receiving ERA in order to do this. To use another payment anology in the cycle of electronic transactions, if an EFT is your paycheck than ERA is your paystub for the deposit.

Setting up EFT does require some leg work in establishing connections with payers and talking with your bank, but the benefits to your practice will more than pay for this upfront time. Once your practice begins receiving EFT and ERA, you will also be able to begin using Partner's autoposting feature to automatically post insurance payments, and your practice will begin seeing a more seamless electronic cycle of sending and receiving payments. This will go a long way toward streamlining your office processes, reducing the amount of paper you have to sift through, and speeding your cash flow. 

We have created new documentation in our PCC Help site that provides recommendations for configuring the PCC Partner software to perform H1N1 billing and recall. Read the new documentation here.

Need more information about H1N1? We have a number of other resources on PedSource and will continue to update and add new ones as new information becomes available. 

H1N1 Vaccine Information and Resources -  General Info and links to helpful resources

Swine Flu Coding and Other Interesting News - Blog post about H1N1 Coding

AMA Fact Sheet on H1N1 Reporting - Downloadable PDF

H1N1 Codes Issued - Information on vaccine and admin codes

Procedure Code and CVX Codes Assigned to H1N1 - Preliminary info and recommendations on H1N1 vaccinations

And, don't forget to use your pediatric peers as a valuable resource. There have been lots of discussion about the H1N1 vaccine on our PartnerTalk and PedTalk forums, so check out what your peers are saying!

The data in your Practice Vitals Dashboard is refreshed each month and we regularly make new updates to the site. Here are some of the most recent improvements to your Practice Vitals Dashboard:

• A "Recall Efficiency" indicator has been added to the dashboard which summarizes how well your practice is doing in keeping their patients up-to-date on well visits. Also, new age-specific benchmarks have been added, showing how many patients in each age group are up-to-date on well visits. Your dashboard now uses the Bright Futures Periodicity Schedule to define how many well visits each patient should have during specific age ranges.
• Your "% of Asthma patients up-to-date on flu shot" indicator is updated more frequently (every couple weeks) and indicates how many of your asthma patients have had their seasonal flu vaccine this season.
• Advanced Dashboard users now have the ability to save patient recall lists to their Desktop as a .csv file.

You can see more descriptions of these new features and all other monthly Dashboard changes in the "Recent Updates" section on the Dashboard login page. Log in to your Practice Vitals Dashboard today!

The American Medical Association has issued a new H1N1 vaccine administration CPT code and revised an existing influenza vaccine code to include the H1N1 vaccine

The two codes are:

90470-H1N1 immunization administration (intramuscular, intranasal), including counseling when performed

90663-Influenza virus vaccine, pandemic formulation, H1N1

Changes take effect immediately, according to the AMA. Read more about the new CPT codes.

Medicare also recently issued its own new HCPCS codes, G9141 - Influenza A (H1N1) immunization administration (includes the physician counseling the patient/family). and G9142 - Influenza A (H1N1) vaccine, any route of administration.

It's not yet clear how the new CPT codes will affect Medicare's use of the G-codes. Click here to download a PDF with more information.

New ICD-9 codes take effect on OCtober 1! Do you need to edit your practice's diagnosis list in Partner?

You can run the Table Editor (ted) in way that will sort the diagnosis table by code. At a command prompt, type, "ted -s ins -t5". Partner will open your Diagnosis Table listing, sorted by code, and you can review and edit your diagnoses. The Smart Report Suite (srs) also has a report that lists your diagnoses. It is found in the "Partner Table Lists" section.

Remember: always clone or create new diagnosis entries, don't delete or write over existing entries. Be sure and contact PCC Support at 800-722-1082 if you need any help editing your table.

PCC also has a few helpful resources to help you with the new ICD-9 updates. First, we have a 2010 ICD-9 Coding Cube, a fun and handy way to help you remember some of the new codes that pediatric offices will use regularly.

If you're looking for a more complete listing of important ICD-9 code updates of particular interest to pediatric offices, you can download the full handout provided to attendees of our recent Weblab, "Prepare Your Practice for 2010 ICD-9 Updates."