Some Clarification Needed

I need to take a quick moment to post some clarification to my post on March 16. For item #4 'SOAPware Clearing House integration', it is not worded very well. It should read as 'SOAPware Clearing House automation'. This represents our billing systems ability to send claims to a clearing house and automated remit posting among other things. It is very important to note that with our SOAPware Standard Billing release you will be able to upload claims and process them accordingly. In short, with Standard Billing you will be able to use a clearing house.

Billing Release Schedule

I wanted to spend a few moments talking about the different billing related releases that will be offered over the next year or so.

First and foremost, the CMS-1500 form generation tool has been approved by our QA staff and is ready to be released. It will be included in the SOAPware 2009 offering (the next major release of SOAPware). The release date for that is ASAP. We had hoped to have it released by now but we have had to make some adjustments in the Rx Manager that has taken longer than expected. As soon as I can nail down a release date for this I will let you know.

For those of you who are new to the site, the CMS-1500 form generation tool allows you to create a CMS-1500 form in SOAPware, will be stored along with the SuperBill in the chart and can be printed directly onto a pre-printed CMS-1500 form or to a color laser that would print the data and the form. Because it's stored along with the SuperBill you can re-load and reprint the form (with data) when needed.

There is a second offering that may or may not go out this summer. This offering allows users to export a 837p form to a file on your hard drive. This file can then be uploaded to insurance or a clearing house for processing. This isn't an official offering as of yet and it may be rolled until the later main billing release. Over the next month or two we will have a better idea on where we stand with this.

The third offering is scheduled for the 4^th quarter of 2009. This is the main billing offering by SOAPware and likely will be called our standard billing system. This will include the accounting/ledger functionality along with reports and the ability to process claims. Most of my future blogging will be themed towards this release.

The forth offering is scheduled in 2010 and will include automation or integration with our clearing house GEDI. The details for this release will be fleshed out later this year.

So to sum it up:

1. SOAPware 2009/CMS-1500 – Pushing to release ASAP
   
2. Billing 837p – Possible Summer, may get rolled into main Winter release.
   
3. SOAPware Standard Billing - Winter 2009
   
4. SOAPware Clearing House integration – 2010
   

If you have any questions about these releases please let me know.  

O Billing, Where Art Thou?

Here at SOAPware we get a large number of calls inquiring as to the status of our Billing application with the #1 question being, when will it be released. I wanted to take a few moments to talk about the past, where we are and where we are going with this application.

To put it simply the Billing product has been quite the adventure for us over the past couple of years. We originally licensed a billing system to integrate into SOAPware but during that process we had a key member of our team pass away. This was certainly a shock to us all, and obviously delayed our progress towards having an integrated Billing system. We decided at that point to seek outside help to complete the integration in hopes of getting Billing to market as fast as possible. As we neared completion of the project though, we started to see what we felt were some rather large problems that would have to be addressed.

Without going into too much detail, we started to understand that the technology that the billing system was built on (which was different than what SOAPware is built on) presented some logistical problems in terms of installation on newer operating systems such as Vista. It also became apparent to us that there were a number of licensing concerns beyond the Billing and SOAPware applications that was pushing the price of the product into a range that we weren't comfortable offering to our customers. Because of these and other factors, we decided to stop development on what could be considered a nearly completed product. These types of decisions are very difficult to make but it's one that had to be made for the betterment of the Billing product and SOAPware as a whole.

From that point, we went back to the drawing board and started over. We began work last year creating our own Billing system built on the technology that our entire product line is built on. We quickly found out though that we now had a different problem on our hands. SOAPware (the EMR software) needs constant attention. Things are changing so fast in the medical world that as a development team we are always working on adding new features and addressing standards such as CCHIT. We were trying to add new features, address standards, and develop Billing in very short time frames. Important issues, such as quality control in SOAPware, were falling through the cracks.

Once we identified that the quality control was becoming a major problem in SOAPware, we had stop, go back to the drawing board, and figure out a way to do all the things we want while maintaining quality and production throughout our product lines. This effort is what Dr. Oates refers to in his latest blog posting . What this means to billing is that we now have a dedicated team working on the billing product to ensure its success, and a dedicated QA team to insure it's quality.

Back to the question of when billing will be released. We get this question on a daily basis and it's been a difficult one for us to answer because of the fast changing nature of the EMR side of the software. Now that billing has a dedicated team, we can more acutely estimate our resources and dedicate time towards the project. The answer to when it will be released is that it is very likely to be the 4^th quarter of 2009. If that estimate changes for whatever reason we will let you know through the blog as soon as we know. It's our intent, moving forward, to keep you as informed as is possible on the status of our billing product.

If you have taken the time to read all of this, I hope that you take the time to sign up and follow this blog. Over the next few months, I will post updates on the Billing project with the intent of keeping you as informed as possible. If there is any specific issue you would like me to blog about pertaining to billing, please let me know.