Collections Report and ERA process question

jpmd wrote on Wednesday, December 09, 2009:

Our billing service company has been using OpenEMR to send out claims and post payments.  They are having some issues that I wanted to post to the community.  Is anyone else having the issues described below?

“Many patients are showing a credit balance,  and we are manually adjusting claims that may be posted twice.  We still have the problem with double adjustments and this means that if the patient owes deductible or a co pay amount, they are not being billed, because they show a credit balance”

The other issue is if the balance is coming out on the collection report for patient due and it is really due from insurance.  I will never see it on by due by insurance collection list.  We need to be able to reverse this and get it back to insurance responsibility.  Our collectors are taught that they are to concentrate on Insurance Due balances.  They do not work patient due balances, so I am concerned that this will become a timely issue on some of these.  Sometimes the patient is initially set up as Self Pay and then when the patient gets a bill, they call us with the insurance, we bill it out, but it stays in due by patient"

From what I gather from other softwares the balance owed by the patient should never be written off unless it is due by patient.  The system seems to always write off balances when an ERA is processed.  Is this correct?  Thanks

Jude Pierre, MD
Phyaura, LLC