There seems to be a problem in payment processing in relation to the collection_report.
Lets say we post a partial insurance payment for an encounter, which covers only one of the CPT codes of the fee sheet. Then, if we run collection report, this encounter would only show up in the “Due Pt” category, but not in the “Due Ins” as I would expect. This is re-creatable in the current 4.1.2 demo, see the patient named Payment Problem with 2014-08-12 as a service date until it’s refreshed.
It looks that form_encounter.last_level_closed is not handled properly in the library.payment.inc.php and interface/billing/new_payment.php.
I see the traces of this problem in the data from a few years back. It causes billers to miss a lot of claims for insurance follow up…
See 2103 Demo (resets 9/1, 8:02 PDST) for Phil Belford, dos 8/25/14.
When posting partial payments, use “Done with: None”. The search for Due Ins. is correct with this choice. See attachments.
If “Done With: Ins 1” is clicked and patient has only 1 insurance, it appears that Due Ins. is inaccurate but the Billing View correctly shows the unpaid amount still out to insurance.
If the module is instructed that posting with insurance 1 has been finished, logically any remaining balance would transfer to the patient.
The module does seem to have the ability to interpret partially finished with the “None” click option.
Posting in Batch Payments is fine for Medicare, but greater flexibility can be had in EOBs when posting secondary remittances. There is nothing that Batch Payments can do that EOBs cannot. The inverse is not true, however.
Collections is a bit of a misnomer. It will report payments over a period of time, but will not serve as a tool to track delinquent accounts. See this thread.
The last billing activity column is not exact, but you can compensate by selecting meaningful service dates.
The collection report is the only tool to follow up on delinquent insurance accounts - minus the bug in the batch payment. It is a bug, I can’t fix it. I’m asking the authors, Eldho Chacko eldho@zhservices.com or Paul Simon K paul@zhservices.com, to take a look.