Kareo’s latest release includes several new features requested by our customers, including: institutional billing using the UB-04 claim format, an enhancement to our patient statement and mailing services to support the National Change of Address (NCOA) service, full support for anesthesia billing including start and end times for anesthesia charges, and an improvement to our task assignment feature that allows you to assign tasks to people in a specific practice. In this post, I’ve outlined how these features work and how we expect them to help you, and discuss some ideas we have for our next release.

Institutional Billing Using UB-04 Claim Format — Available for Beta Testing

Kareo now has support for institutional billing using the UB-04 claim format, the standard, uniform bill (UB) for institutional healthcare providers that was developed by the American Hospital Association. The UB-04 claim format is used to bill government and commercial insurance companies for non-professional charges, such as hospital, ambulatory surgery center, home health, nursing facility, and other services. Prior to the general release of UB-04 billing in a few weeks, Kareo is now recruiting customers to participate in a private testing program featuring additional training and support and an opportunity to provide feedback to our product team. If you are interested in joining our beta test program, please email us at support@kareo.com.

Patient Change of Address Reports – Ensure Your Patient Statements Are Received

Kareo has enhanced its patient statement printing and mailing services to include support for the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) National Change of Address (NCOA) service. Kareo now runs all patient addresses through the USPS NCOA database and returns a new Patient Change of Address report that shows patients with updated addresses. Kareo also makes it easy for you to update multiple patient demographics records with updated addresses with one-click. Check for the new reports delivered to your account under Encounters > Clearinghouse Reports > Patient Statements.

Obviously, collecting payment from patients who have moved at best delays the process and at worst, eliminates the possibility of collecting at all. With this new feature included in Kareo, you can reduce the number of bad addresses in your records and improve your collection rate. If you have ideas on how we can further improve the patient statement printing and mailing process, please send your ideas to us at features@kareo.com.

Full Support for Anesthesia Billing – Correctly Calculate and Bill Anesthesia Charges

Kareo now offers full support for anesthesia billing. You can now enter Encounters that include anesthesia charges using start and end times. Kareo automatically calculates the minutes and units using anesthesia settings on your fee schedules and contracts, and determines the correct amount to bill insurance companies and patients. Kareo has also updated its CMS 1500 form printing and electronic claim formats to fully support anesthesia billing. If you have any questions, please email us at support@kareo.com.

We heard from our anesthesiology customers that they needed a quick and easy way to calculate and bill anesthesia charges, and this feature will allow you to bill appropriately for your contracted amounts. If you have suggestions for how we can continue to improve the anesthesia billing function or another specialty area, please send your ideas to us at features@kareo.com.

Improved Task Assignment Feature – User Lists Specific to Chosen Practice

Prior to this release, the list of all users in your entire company would be displayed when assigning tasks to people in a specific practice. For certain customers, such as billing companies, this was a problem. Kareo has now fixed this problem so that you only see the list of users in a specific practice when assigning tasks in that practice.

Features in Development for 2010

As I mentioned in December, we have an aggressive schedule of new releases planned for 2010. Among the enhancements we are currently developing are EMR integration (soon to be announced), patient recalls, credit card and ACH processing of patient payments, patient collection rules with new letters and statements, new practice setup wizard, and much more.

At Kareo, customer feedback drives our service and ensures we build the features that matter most to people like you, so your input is critical to us. If you have an idea for a new Kareo feature, please email your idea to features@kareo.com.