Managing Billing Providers (Suppliers)

In older versions of SOS, “Billing Providers” were known as “Suppliers”. They represent business entities that bill and collect money. In the case of a provider, working alone without a surrogate legal entity such as a corporation, LLC, PA, or partnership, the Billing Provider might be the same as the person who actually renders patient care. Current day healthcare delivery in the United States, however, more often involves some sort of legal/financial entity, and in SOS that entity is the Billing Provider. It is the name on the bank account into which your fees are deposited. To generate insurance claims or patient statements, you will have to define at least one Billing Provider.

Expand Billing Lookups in the navigation bar on the left side of your screen and select Billing Providers (Suppliers).

From this list, you can add an new Billing Provider, or view, modify, or delete (if not already in use) any entry already in the list.

Create a new Billing Provider

As with other list views in SOS, to add a new item you can click the “New” icon in the upper left of the toolbar, press the <CTRL><N> key combination, or right click to select New from the pop-up menu. You will then see the Billing Provider form. Once complete, the form will look something like the example below. Note particularly that there is a panel on the form in which you can customize the “letterhead” that SOS will print at the top of your patient billing statements. In addition to the name of the organization to be paid, you can include any other information you would like to display there. It is generally a good idea to include the billing department contact information. On some SOS statement formats this information can be adjusted to print in the upper window of a dual window envelope, in which case you would adjust the text and layout appropriately. If you are using pre-printed letterhead for your statements, then you would normally leave these fields blank.

One note regarding the Pay-To Provider panel on this screen: When generating insurance claims, you will notice an option in which you can force the data entered in this panel to replace the default data for a specific claim run.

On the bottom of this form are several tabs. The currently-selected Communications tab allows you to add addresses, phone numbers, and emails if you wish. (Adding items to an SOS Communications list is detailed in an article about Patient Communications if you need the specifics.)

Of particular significance, however, is the second tab, Carrier Specific ID’s. From time to time an organization may have to use a different identifier when sending claims to a particular payer. You can add an entry on the Carrier Specific ID’s tab if you have that situation in your organization. For example, perhaps your state’s Medicaid program requires that claims be filed using your Medical Director’s NPI, rather than the organization NPI that you normally use. SOS will automatically use the default information from the main form above, except when creating claims for the insurance payer specified in your Carrier Specific ID configuration.