Overview

You should enter a charge whenever an encounter with a patient results in a fee or an amount that you will want to bill and track, or when you have rendered a service to be recorded in the patient’s ledger. Typically, a service will be rendered and a fee will be charged. In many cases, the responsibility for paying that fee will fall on the patient — or on another responsible party — and one or more insurance companies. As you enter the charge for the service, you can divide the amount due among the responsible parties. In most cases a portion of the charge will be “split” to the patient, and the rest will be “split” to the primary insurance carrier. Later, when payments are received, you can assign the remaining balance to the available payers on the account. For example, if insurance denies a claim, you can move responsibility back to the patient, or perhaps to a secondary insurance payer.

Manual Charge Entry

1. To enter a charge, begin by opening the Daysheet screen. Expand Billing in the navigation bar, then click Daysheet.
   
2. From there, open the Charge Entry form by clicking the left-most icon on the toolbar, or by right-clicking anywhere in the daysheet list area and selecting the top option, New Charge.
   
3. Selecting a patient. Click anywhere in the Patient field, or <TAB> to the field and press <ENTER> to open the patient list. You can type anything you like for the full text search, including any part of a name or birthdate and the list will be immediately filtered down to just the rows that contain the characters you typed for the search. For example, first name, last name, or birthday (like “4/12”). Note that even matches in the middle of a name or date are included, so in our example below, all patients with birth dates starting with “5/”, as well as those birthdates containing “5/” in the middle, are counted as matches. When you see the desired patient appear in the selection list, click that row, or highlight it using the arrow keys and press <ENTER> to select.Once the patient has been selected, several pieces of information will appear in the charge screen. The patient’s most recently used POS (place of service) code and Sort Code (optional) will appear if there has been a previous charge entry made for this patient. The Provider will be selected based on your preference in Settings > System Options >Transactions > Charge Defaults.If any default values are missing or not correct for the charge you are entering, you can correct each. A little button with a “V” arrow symbol to the right of a field indicates that you can select from a list (or calendar, in the case of a date). To do so, move the mouse cursor over the field and click the field, or the “V” button at the right of the field. Most of the fields on the charge screen are, in fact, selection lists that work just as described above for the Patient list. Once you have selected patient, service, and provider SOS will find the appropriate fee and divide it among the patient’s payors as your various settings dictate. In most cases, that will complete the entry and you will be able to save and continue with additional transactions or other tasks.

You may have some questions about some of the fields on the Charge screen, so let’s take a closer look at those that may be unfamiliar to you:

• Care Episode. The Care Episode can be thought of as an “admission”. If a patient completes or terminates treatment and returns at a later date for more care, you should open a new Care Episode for her and select it as the Active Care Episode. If you do so, it will automatically be inserted into your new charge entries, but you can use select any of the patients other episodes for a particular charge. For more information about Care Episodes, please see the related article.
• Claim Type. Select “None” for non-insurance charge entries. For insurance-billable entries in the Standard Version of SOS, the only other choice for Claim Type is “Professional”. If you are using the Pro Version of SOS, you can choose either “Professional” for billing normal office services that could be filed on a CMS1500 claim form, or “Institutional” if the charge is one that could be filed on a UB claim form.
• Claim Setup. SOS Standard only supports one Claim Setup per Care Episode, so the system will use it automatically. SOS Pro, however, supports an unlimited number of Claim Setups. You could, for example, have one Claims Setup that is right for home visits and a different one for in-office treatment. The right choice will be apparent if you use a good description when you create each of your Claim Setups. For more information about Claim Setups, please see the related article.
• J#. This value is simply a sequential number that the system automatically assigns to every transaction. It can be valuable for reporting and troubleshooting.
• Sort Code. The Sort Code is an arbitrary value that your organization can use to help with unique reporting requirements. When an organization uses Sort Codes, the system administrator will probably have configured the Sort Code field as mandatory. In that case the Sort Code prompt will be colored red and you won’t be able to save your charge entry without selecting a value for that field.
• CPT Modifier. CPT Modifiers further describe the nature of the service being billed. Many services do not require any modifiers, but others won’t be paid without them. You will have to check with your payers to be sure.
• Charge Dx. Each charge submitted to an insurance payer must be accompanied by one or more diagnoses, appropriate for the type of service being billed. The lookup list for the four Dx fields will show all active diagnosis codes that are on the patient’s Care Episode diagnostic list. If the diagnosis you want to use does not appear on the list, you can add it on-the-fly by clicking the NEW button at the bottom of the lookup list.

Prior to saving your charge, be sure to review the panel at the bottom of the charge screen to see how SOS has split the fee among the payers on the account. If you want to change the amount of a split, just double click the row, adjust the amount, and save. In 99% of the cases, you will have to change at least two of the rows to keep the overall fee the same. SOS always adjusts the fee to match the sum of the split amounts, so if you were to increase just one split by $5, the fee will increase by $5 as well. Reduce a different split by $5 to bring the total fee for the service back to the correct amount. If the splits are not correct, your aging reports will not be correct either.

If you find that SOS is not calculating the charge splits the way you think it should be, start by reviewing our article that explains exactly the process in detail.

Tip

You have probably noticed the Copy Previous Service button. Using this button, you can reproduce any previous charge in a patient’s ledger for the current date. For the details, please see this article on the topic.

List View Filter Editor

The SOS G5 List View Filter Editor was created by SOS’s programming tool partner, DevExpress, which has published a good overview of the component on the DevExpress YouTube channel. You will probably find the portion from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to be a valuable introduction.

The following walkthrough is a DevExpress transcript of the two and a half minute portion from 30 seconds to 3 minutes of the video:

Invoking the Filter Editor and Creating Simple Filter Criteria

To invoke the Filter Editor, right-click any column header and select Filter Editor… in the context menu.

By default, the Filter Editor displays filter criteria as a tree where individual nodes represent simple filter conditions. The root node is the logical operator combining all conditions. Any filter condition consists of three parts: a column name, criteria operator and operand value. If the grid’s data is not filtered, the editor contains one incomplete filter condition for the clicked column.

Click the value box and select Medium in the dropdown list.

Click OK to close the editor and apply changes. As a result, the grid displays only records with a priority set to Medium. Now you can invoke the Filter Editor using the Edit Filter button within the Filter Panel.

To add a new filter condition, click the plus button next to the root node. This can also be done by clicking the logical operator and selecting Add Condition.

Select Name in the list of available columns. Then, use the Contains comparison operator and enter the ‘vendor’ string in the value box. Click Apply to filter data without closing the editor.

The grid now displays records with medium priority and names containing ‘vendor’ in them.

Deleting Filter Conditions

Now delete all filter conditions by clicking their buttons or by selecting Clear All in the logical operator’s menu.

Constructing Complex Filter Criteria

Searching and Filtering List Views

There are two ways to search a list. You can use the Find Panel or the Auto Filter Row.

The Find Panel searches every column looking for matches and reduces the list to only those rows that contain the text you have specified. The Auto Filter Row works a bit differently. As you can see in the screenshot above, the Auto Filter Row provides an open field below each column heading. If you type some text below the Full Name heading, for example, the list will be filtered down to just those rows where the Full Name contains the text that you have entered. In addition, text fields (as opposed to numeric or date fields) by default contain a little ABC icon. Click that icon to specify the filter option you want to use. The default setting is to match data that contains the text you type, but there are many other options including “is equal” (exact match), “begins with”, “ends with”, and even negative conditions such as “does not contain”:

There is a similar feature for number and date fields. Clicking the default “=” icon provides options including “does not equal”, “is greater than”, “is less than” and more. Date fields also include an icon on the right end of the field that you can click to display a date picker pop-up that you may prefer to typing a date.

If you do not see the Search feature you would like to use, right-click any column heading and select the feature (“Show Find Panel” or “Show Auto Filter Row”) on the pop-up menu. To do your search, enter text into either the Find Panel or the Auto Filter Row, or both. You can even put search text under more than one column. As you add or change search conditions, the list will shrink to show only those rows that match ALL the criteria you have specified. The video below demonstrates the features:

G5 list views provide other options to create even more powerful filters. When you move the mouse over a column heading, you will see a tiny funnel icon appear to the right of the heading text. Click that icon to display a filter creation tool that is appropriate to that column. For example, if you were to click that icon on the Primary Provider heading, you would reveal a window containing a checklist of all the providers found in the list. If we wanted to filter the list down to just patients with primary providers “AA”, “KP”, and “SK” all we need do is to check the desired provider codes:

Doing so creates a more complex filter condition that reduces the patient list to only those who have a primary provider that we checked. Note that as you create filters using either the Auto Filter Row, or the funnel in the column headings, the system generates a more formal filter expression that displays at the bottom of the list. We can add more conditions by using the funnel or Auto Filter Row on other columns. Here is the result if we use the Auto Filter Row to add the condition that the patient birth date must be on or after January 1, 1970. Note the new condition that appears in the filter expression along with our original primary provider specification:

Once a filter has been specified, you can view or even construct much more elaborate filters using the built-in filter editor. To launch the editor, click “Edit Filter” at the right end of the line showing the filter expression, or right-click any column heading and select Filter Editor. Use of the Filter Editor is an advanced topic. You can find more information about the Filter Editor here.

Moving columns

To move a column to a different position, simply click and drag. See the video below:

 

Resize Columns

As with many other software products, to resize a column, click the left or right edge of the column heading and drag it to the desired position.

Hiding Columns

To hide a column, right-click the column heading and select Hide This Column from the pop-up menu.

Displaying Hidden Columns and Adding New Columns

To restore a previously hidden column, or to add a new column, right-click any of the column headings and select Column Chooser from the pop-up. A small grid will appear, displaying columns that are available to display on the current list. Click and drag the new column to the desired location among the column headings. Two arrows will appear, indicating the target placement. When the arrows show the desired position, drop the column by releasing the mouse button. When you are finished adding columns, close the Column Chooser window by clicking the X in its upper right corner. See the video below:

 

Sorting List by Column Value

Just as in Windows’ File Explorer, click the desired column heading to sort the list by the values in that column. Clicking again, will reverse the sort order.

Grouping

To group the items in a list by the value in a particular column, either:

• Right-click the desired column and select Group By This Column from the pop-up menu, or…
• Drag columns into the Group By Box just above the column headings. If you don’t see a Group By Box, then right-click any column heading and select Show Group By Box.

With either technique, you can add sub-grouping by repeating the process with additional columns. You can either drag or click interchangeably. For example, instead of dragging, you can select Group By This Column on the pop-up menu, and your selected column will appear in the Group By Box. You can then drag another column into the box and the second column will be shown as a subgroup under the first. To quickly cancel grouping, right-click the Group By Box and select Clear Grouping from the pop-up menu.

 

Group Summaries

Once you have grouped your list, you can easily add summaries to the group headings. Here is an example in which we have grouped our patients by primary provider and have added summaries that show the count of patients in each group, as well as the most recent intake (maximum intake date) for each provider:

In order to display group summaries, right-click the summary column heading in the Group By Box and select Group Summary Editor from the pop-up menu. To get the results above, we used the following configuration:

That is, after showing the editor, we checked the Count option at the top, selected the Intake Date field, and checked the Max summary type. Because Intake Date is a date type of data, the Average and Sum types of summaries are not available, but if we had selected a regular numeric field, we could have easily selected either of those. In addition, if you would like to select more than one of the available summaries, you can do that. If we wanted to, we could have selected Min as well as Max to show the earliest as well as the most recent intake in each provider group.

The other tab of the Group Summary Editor window allows us to change the order in which the summaries are displayed. The order we have shown in our example above is Count followed by Max Intake Date, but we could have easily reversed them using the Order tab of this editor.

see also:
How to Print Reports and Query Your Data Using List Views