As you may have noticed from our November 2009 release notes, we launched a new version of Kareo’s medical billing software this past weekend. In this post, I’d like to explain the enhancements in this release, the reasons we focused on these areas, and why it took us so long to get this release out the door. Toward the end of this article, I’ll also provide some details on some of the new enhancements that are likely to be the focus of the next few releases.
New Claim and Provider Number Settings
The Kareo customer support team spends a large portion of their time helping new and existing customers to configure the tax ID numbers, National Provider Identifier (NPI) numbers, and other provider and group numbers that are required for electronic claim submissions and paper claim printing. The current process is complex, and if done incorrectly, can result in claim rejections and denials that disrupt a provider’s cash flow.
So we have designed a new process of configuring the claim and provider number settings that vastly simplifies the setup process for new practices. This new process provides simple options for configuring the tax ID and the group and individual NPI numbers. This new process also eliminates the dependency on legacy, payer-assigned provider and group numbers that was a major source of complexity in the original settings. The goal is to help customers send clean claims the first time for new practices. For more information about these enhancements, please read the Kareo Claim Settings Guide.
This is important work, but as you can imagine, it’s a risky change for existing customers that have already completed the setup process and are submitting claims successfully. So we launched the new setup process only to new customers that signed up for Kareo after November 6, 2009. For now, Kareo will continue to support the legacy setup process for existing customers. But eventually, within a few months, all accounts will be safely transitioned to the new setup process.
Given the risks associated with this change and the technical complexity of developing technology to support two different claim settings modes simultaneously, we took a little extra time with this release to get it right and minimize the likelihood of any disruption to the claim submission process for existing customers.
Real-Time Insurance Eligibility Enhancements
Kareo has offered real-time insurance eligibility checks for a couple years now. But historically, our customers have been slow to adopt this powerful feature. We believe eligibility checks are vital to eliminating downstream claim rejections and denials. So we studied our customer base to understand how to increase adoption and we identified several usability problems that were preventing customers from using eligibility checks successfully.
In this release, we have fixed these usability problems with real-time insurance eligibility checks. First, we changed the setup process so you can now perfom eligibility checks for an individual provider or a group practice. Second, we now allow you to check insurance eligibility for specific categories of medical services, such as “Office Visits” versus “Surgery”. Third, we have posted eligibility enrollment forms on our website. Finally, we have also made certain backend changes to accommodate the unique requirements of certain insurance companies or government payers.
With these enhancements, we now believe Kareo’s real-time insurance eligibility checks are ready for prime-time usage by all customers and we strongly urge you to consider incorporating this powerful feature into your scheduling and patient registration process. For instructions on how to get started with real-time insurance eligibility, please read the Kareo Real-Time Insurance Eligibility Guide.
Features Being Considered for Future Kareo Releases
With these projects behind us, we have an aggressive product development schedule for the remainder of this year and going into 2010. You should expect new releases every 2-3 months. Some of the enhancements on our short-term roadmap include tasks and ticklers, appointment reminders, patient recalls, credit card & ACH processing of patient payments, new practice setup wizard, facility billing (UB04/837I), patient collection rules with new letters and statements, and much more. If you have an idea for a new Kareo feature, please email your idea to features@kareo.com.
