Friday, September 12, 2014

Optometric Billing: Why I Hate Officemate, Part 4

In part 4 of this mini-series we will look at Officemate's Automatic Insurance Payment Posting System. The bottom line...IT IS BROKEN and has been since the first generation of the software.

Take a look at the below screen shot:








In the above example, the user imported a remittance advice file into office mate and auto-posted it. It clearly shows that the patient paid their $25.00 co-pay but still transferred a $25.00 copay to the patient's responsibility! As usual, I approached office mate tech support with the issue and they told me what they always tell me : "Works as designed, no plans to fix".  Can you believe that?!?!

What this means to your practice:
Quite literally, this means that if you are using auto-post, you will never be able to trust the system when it applies payments to patients' balances. The problem goes deeper as financial errors always snowball (think back to that missing check # in your check book that you can't reconcile for the life of you). If you don't check the work, which literally defeats the purpose of auto-posting, you will not be able to keep accurate financial records or send accurate statements and invoices to patients. This will not only mean that any financial reports you run out of officemate will NEVER be accurate (which again, defeats the purpose of having automated office management software), but you will also cause your patients to either over-pay you or get extremely upset at you causing you to loose customers and receive negative reviews in the community that you serve....all because you chose officemate. I can tell you from experience, having an patient call you due to an officemate-generated statement you sent them is NEVER pleasant experience.

There is good news. There are tons of software solutions you can choose and opticXpress can help you find the right one...