Many physical rehabilitation and psychological clinics throughout Canada accept and work with Extended Health Care patients. Depending on the coverage plan, Extended Health Care covers a wide range of services for their clients such as physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, orthotics, psychological therapy, etc.
The challenge most office administrators face is how to process the paperwork, track usage of the coverage and notify patients in time to let them know when their coverage is about to be exhausted.
We’ve been working with these kinds of facilities and clinics to help find a better, more organized way to solve these issues. The following four tools in Universal Office will give you control and help prevent going over the available coverage limits.
- Capture benefits schedule
At intake and whenever patient reports change, you will record the details of the insurance company that issued the policy along with the policy (or group) number and the Certificate (ID) number.Then you will record the benefits schedule and limit for every service that was prescribed to the patient into their file. These services must be available in the patient’s benefits schedule booklet. The details may include the type of service (physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage therapy, paramedical, etc.), the benefits effective calendar year, prescription requirements, maximum coverage, paid receipt requirement, etc. - Create treatment plan
Once all desired benefits schedules are in, you will then create a treatment plan based on that information. This will help you determine how many visits it takes until the limits of the benefits are reached.The treatment plan will also help make sure that you stay on top of patient treatment progress. In cases where the patient fails to attend or reschedule appointments, the system will yield and place the treatment plan into the Reassessments Due alert. Thus letting you know that the treatment plan, which was supposed to last four weeks, was never fulfilled. - Schedule and bill visits
When the time comes to schedule appointments, you will use that treatment plan to book them. Every time you book an appointment, the system will subtract from the remaining visits on the plan – giving scheduling and billing a whole new meaning.This means receptionists will know ahead of time before plans get exhausted, giving them the ability to tell patients their remaining number of visits covered by their insurer. And since the plan is based on patient benefits schedules, you will know exactly what’s remaining off of those benefits. No more guessing games! - Extract and review reports
Would you like to know which patients will have renewed benefits in the coming year? Universal Office provides plenty of reports. For example, extract a report on all patients with renewed paramedical services who are eligible for orthotics in the New Year.You can also have the system extract a list of mailing labels with the addresses of those patients (as well as email addresses). These tools streamline your process, save you time and organize patient information – allowing you to spend more time with patients and less time on paperwork.
For more information on how to utilize these features, please refer to the Guide to Extended Health Benefits Tracking.