We find ourselves feeling grateful for you, our loyal customers. We are pleased to have served you for these past 31 years and look forward to continuing to meet your needs for practice management, scheduling, and clinical record software.
For you and your families, we wish a warm and safe holiday. May we all feel grateful for the good in our lives, for the privilege we experience, for the opportunity to work and to grow, for the people we hold dear . . . and for so much more.
Thank you!
The article below was written by Seth Krieger, SOS President, and shared with SOS users through the SOS Newsgroup and SOS User Group.
There are a handful of current ICD-10 psych-related diagnosis codes that will change on October 1 (the start of CMS’s 2017 Fiscal Year). Specifically:
| F32.8 |
| F34.8 |
| F42 |
| F50.8 |
| F64.1 |
| F80.89 |
| L98.1 |
| N94.3 |
See this link or type http://surl.sosoft.com/icd102016 into your web browser to view, download, or print a detailed reference sheet from American Psychiatric Association. Or try this link from the American Psychological Association which lists these eight codes which will be come fourteen codes beginning October 1.
You can also view a broader rundown of the upcoming changes on the CMS web site.
You will want to complete all your September claims prior to making any changes! Once your billing for all services through September 30 has been done, then make the needed Dx changes in Lookups > Diagnosis Codes and in affected patient claim setups (professional and institutional), plus in your Case Manager data, if you use SOS’s clinical records product.
Sound like a bunch of work? Well, we have you covered. SOS has created a new report that will sift through the places where you might have used one of these Dx codes, looking for the specific codes that are in the list of October 1, 2016 changes for mental/behavioral disorders. The report output looks like this:
The data in the sample above contains randomly generated values and no actual protected health information.
The highlighted rows belong to patients who have one or more Dx’s in the group above. Yellow signifies Professional (1500) claim setup; green indicates Institutional (UB04) claim setup; and cyan indicates Case Manager (clinical record) data. The report provides a way for you to quickly identify where you will have to make changes to avoid claim rejections and to stay current with the 10/2016 changes.
Rather than changing current claim setups, OM Pro users should create a new claim setup for Professional and/or Institutional claims, replacing the diagnosis codes that have changed. Don’t forget to mark the new claim setups as the Default before starting to enter new services in October!
IMPORTANT: This report includes the entire Active Patient List and could contain sensitive data. If your organization uses SOS’s Advanced Security to restrict staff access to patients, SOS recommends that you use the Admin Module security settings to limit usage of the report to just members of your “Supervisor” access group. If you need assistance with this task, please contact Support. An alternative would be to install the report, run it, then delete it.
This new report for SOS users can be downloaded at the following address: https://sosoft.com/files/downloads/ICD10-2016.rpt. Please note that clicking the link will download the report, not bring you to a page. If this does not work for you, please cut and paste the link into your browser URL bar.
Once downloaded, copy the report file into the SOS folder of only those computers that will be used to generate the report. Next, a Supervisor User should add an entry to one of your Report menus. Just open the desired menu, press the <Insert> key (or right-click, then select “Add”). Complete the form as shown below and save.
If you have any questions, let us know.
Did you know that your current Support/Update agreement allows you to get support for SOS products by sending an email or by filling in a request on the SOS Help Desk website? Both of these techniques will create a new service ticket at the Help Desk, and a notification that a ticket is waiting automatically goes out to all support staff.
Simply address your request to “support@sosoft.com”. Please include a brief description of your issue. (Note that emailing a specific person at SOS is not a good idea. That person could be out of the office or busy with another project and not see your email for a while. Using the Help Desk is the best way to get a prompt response.)
Be sure to fill in all the required fields (indicated by an asterisk). It is helpful to us if you also fill in your phone number and/or the licensee name that appears at the top of your SOS product’s main screen. If you want to send a screenshot or any other file, you can do so in the Attachments section of the form, but be sure to check anything you are sending to assure it does not include any patient information like names, phone numbers, diagnoses, services rendered or other protected health information (PHI).
. . . be sure to check anything you are sending to assure it does not include any patient information like names, phone numbers, diagnoses, services rendered or other protected health information (PHI).
3. When you have completed the form, click the “Submit Ticket” button at the bottom of the screen to send it. When an SOS staffer has responded, you will receive an email notification at the address you left in your ticket.
Our company, Synergistic Office Solutions, was founded in 1985, 31 years ago. In those early years, writing practice management software was the easy part of the job. The challenging bit was creating custom claim forms for payers upon whom there were, at that time, no requirements for consistency. While electronic claim filing was possible, our customers who were willing to pursue that option were intrepid explorers. Not many went that far into the wilderness.
Then, in 1996, Congress passed a bipartisan bill aimed at allowing continuity of health insurance coverage for workers moving from one job to the next. That same bill adopted standards for claims and other electronic transactions and began the move toward a single paper claim form, the HCFA 1500 . . . with the huge goal of ‘Administrative Simplification.’
Twenty years ago, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to adopt national standards to improve the electronic exchange of health care data. This national standards mandate falls under a part of HIPAA called Administrative Simplification.
As noted in a recent blog post, in 1996 a considerable portion of every health care dollar was spent on administrative overhead for processes that involved:
- Numerous paper forms
- Telephone calls
- Nonstandard electronic commerce
- Many delays in communicating information among different locations
Since the 1996 passage of HIPAA, HHS has released numerous regulations to adopt required standards. Today 93.8% of all health care claims transactions are conducted in standard form. The standards have helped pave the way for the interoperability of health data to enhance the patient and provider experience.
For details about Administrative Simplification laws and regulations, view the CMS timeline.
For most of us today, HIPAA is likely to conjure up thoughts of protecting patient privacy and the security of patient data, PHI . . . what is often viewed as an increase in administrative responsibility rather than a simplification. But for those of us who have been around long enough to remember some of those unique paper forms, and the totally different claim file structures required by various clearinghouse companies and hundreds of payers, state and government entities, HIPAA has simplified our work. Even so, we do still have a long way to go before we can claim to have achieved anything like ‘administrative simplification.’
For those of you who have been in behavioral health practice or administration longer than twenty years, what are your memories of pre-HIPAA practice? Do you think the law has improved things for patients? What about for you?
Please share your comments below.
A couple of months ago, we surveyed our customers about the type of content we share with you and how you receive it. One clear interest was in receiving How-To information for our products. We decided that the best way to accomplish this would be regular posts here in our blog on how to accomplish various things in our software.
So here we go with a simple start….
New to SOS products? Or maybe you have been using our software for so long you have forgotten some basics!
As you move from window to window and field to field in SOS Office Manager, Case Manager or Appointment Scheduler, you will find explanations and tips appropriate to the currently selected page, button or field up in the left side of the toolbar. This can be especially useful in parts of the program you do not use often, for example, setting up a sliding scale.
You can use Toolbar Help in most areas of SOS programs. Still not sure how to do something? If for any reason you are uncertain about how to accomplish a task you want to do, a Support Tech can assist you.
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