This is a brief over view of the flow of PracticeMaker®5 from patient data entry to billing. This is not meant to be a tutorial but rather show you screen shots and our way of thinking. Remember, this software was designed by a physician to increase productivity with the least amount of effort.

The Patient's Module

Below is the Summary screen from PracticeMaker® 2011. The important points about this screen are as follows:

• The patient can have unlimited linked phone numbers, as well as unlimited linked providers and other contacts (such as attorneys).
  
• The "I " icon next to specific fields (such as Facility and Office Doc) takes you directly to the related database for more information about that record!
  
• The right side of this tab has a yellow Notes field, where the patient can have unlimited, date and time stamped notes.
  
• The small blue section is for a "pop-up" note. When you search for and find a patient's record, the first 200 characters of this note pop-up for you to see!

Below this is the Insurance & Billing tab. It has been organized to follow the expected data entry sequence. For instant help hover of any field with your mouse to get a "tool tip".

• The top section is for Insurance Information. A patient can have unlimited insurances with inactive insurances assigned a Billing Priority # of "99" (With PracticeMaker® NEVER delete an old insurance information, just change its Billing Priority to "99").
  
• To quickly review an insurance carrier's record click directly on its Code highlighted in pink.
• To just edit the Subscriber ID or Group simply click in the respective field.
• To view or edit the entire record click Edit to view the record in its own pop-up window!
  
  
• The lower left section list all past present and even future referrals or prior authorizations. Just with the insurance records, the "current and active" referral is flagged as "99", with its "start" and "end" dates. The "Start Remain" column tells you how many visits the current referral started with a how many remain!
• The lower right section has another tabbed area, with separate tabs for Invoice Options, Billing Notes, Guarantor info, Signature collection and Charge Card info.
  

The Billing Module

The Charge and Payment entry screen has been redesigned. Now charges and payments are added on the same tabbed interface. All logical items have been grouped together and function better.

• Diagnoses are assigned to the invoice using either "drag and drop" or on block by clicking the Fill Invoice Diagnoses button on the top tab. To remove a diagnosis from a claim, just click its red "X". To view the diagnosis record in the Library, click the associated "I" icon.
  
• The Billing Order and invoice  Providers, Facility and Precert's have been organized onto their own tabs.
  
• All Charges are added in the pink area. We still use "temporary fields" where your data is first entered. To add charge click >New> and complete to fields. Click Add to add the charge. The system will check for common errors before actually adding the record.
  
• To edit a charge created TODAY click the pink edit button on the left side of the charge list. In order to edit a charge NOT created today, you must have "admin privileges" and the orange Admin tab in the payments section must be active, otherwise...no way!
• Speaking about payments, these are entered "Initially" in the blue tabbed section. Payments added other than the day the invoice was created are added on the "Additional $$" green tabbed section. Basically, all the previous security that was accomplished on FOUR separate screens has now been reduced to just one!
  
  

The PhoneBook Module

The PhoneBook module stores all the following record types:

• Contact: This is for phonebook entries that do not fall into the other categories
  
• Employer: This is helpful if you are doing workers compensation cases
  
• Facility: This section has your office information, as well as information on any location you either see patients at or refer to (such as an MRI facility).
• Insurances are now stored here, too. In previous versions, the Insurances were store in their own database.
  
• Pharmacy: This record has fields for the pharmacist name and fax number so you can fax prescriptions!
  
• Personnel: Anyone in your practice who uses PracticeMaker® has a record here. You assign access privileges to each "user" in the area of "Admin", "Delete", "Inventory" and "Dispensing" actions.
  
• Providers: The provider screen is below.

 

 

• Vendors: If you deal with vendors, companies you purchase products or services from, their information is put here!
  

The Insurance Module

This is the Insurance screen. There are many time saving features in this module.

Onthe Provider and Memo tab (bottom left) you select which of the 26 provider numbers this insurance wants to see for both the Provider and Consultant. In this example, Medicare wants to see the doctor's NPI number, has is set to NPI only. Other insurances may still only want the "legacy" ID.

To simplify data entry, tabs have been created to organize Billing settings, EClaim settings and Discounting (for out Optical Shop add-on)

The Appointment Scheduler

The Appointment scheduling module allows each provider to have a totally customized schedule. Here are some features...

• Each day's appointments is a scrolling list.
  
• To see a different provider's schedule just select the name from the list. It's that easy!
  
• To see list view of any day on screen, click either the Current button, to view only the selected provider's appointments for today, or the All button, to view all appointments all provider's for that day!
  
• Once a patient is selected in the Patients Module to make an appointment, his or her name appears in the section which below says Selected Patient: No patient selected. You then select the visit type from the Visit Type pop-up list and then click on the appointment time you want to schedule.