Using OpenEMR for tracking claims, not practice management

Management and Administration
1

Hi,

I manage IT for a small billing company that works as a vendor for several hospitals. We receive accounts from the hospital and work to get them paid either through fixing coding errors or contacting the insurance companies. We are looking to upgrade our management system to something more modern, and I stumbled upon OpenEMR while researching my options.

My question is, how feasible is OpenEMR for use in a non-practice scenario? We receive all of the demographics/claims directly from the hospitals so there is no need for all of the scheduling and practice management features, but I do like the organization of the software and it seems like I’d be able to load the transactions/account info I receive directly into OpenEMR’s databases. I have played around with a local copy on my machine and it seems like it has features that would work for this, but I am interested if anyone else has had experience or thinks this would be a possible use case. I’d also look into extending or adding features if necessary, but only if it’s worth pursuing.

The basic work flow I am looking for is:
Receive data → Import to OpenEMR → Keep track of claims and payments coming in per account → Export payments to a file when account is closed

Thanks for any input, loving this community so far.

2

Hi @anthonyjr2 , that’s definitely feasible but would take some work to customize the import from the facility which can be time consuming. My company uses that approach for medical billing for a client who is hospital based.

3

Hi Stephen, thank you for the reply. Writing an import script to the database is something I am capable of, since we already are doing that for the current system we are using. I am curious about the ability to customize the actual OpenEMR window itself though. Is it possible to remove a lot of the practice management and windows that I won’t need? I don’t want our billers to be overwhelmed and would prefer it to be only focusing on the parts we need.

In addition, can I remove the corresponding tables I don’t need from the database? Or do they all need to be there for OpenEMR to work properly? Just wanted to clean things up if possible.