Knowledge base » Release Notes - EpiSoft/CareZone » 2024/07/15 - Release Notes (Admin)
2024/07/15 - Release Notes (Admin)
Release Notes for Admin functions - EpiSoft (Release 2024-07-15)
New Features
Security
This major release includes the ability to support Single Sign On via a customer managed authentication system for staff. This is as an alternate to 2 Factor Authentication which EpiSoft users use now. This is an all or nothing option for all staff and visiting clinicians in a given organisation who will all be required to login using your facility's managed method if enabled.
Your system administrator will still need to setup and credential usesin the EpiDirectory system BUT if you revoke that user's access in your facility's authentication system, they will no longer have access to EpiSoft without having to revoke them in EpiDirectory as well.
If your organisation wishes to use this user authentication method, it will involve a a fee for setup and release of the URL and removal of all staff passwords so they cannot access EpiSoft without going through your managed Login system. If this group includes nursing staff who need to sign the medication chart, then they must first set up p;in numbers in their user preferences page.
Demographics - preferred pronoun new optional field
Preferred pronoun is now an optional field in the patient demographics page and will appear in their demographics if entered. See below
Demographics - no fixed address
1. This can be enabled as an organisation preference
2. See below as to where it shows on the demographic page if enabled
If ticked it will set all the address fields to read-only and clear all values entered in the address fields.
Hospital Booking Wizard now has additional options for Sex
If your organisations uses the Hospital Booking Wizard, cutdown demographic form, the options for sex are now aligned to the demographics page instead of just supporting an M/F radio button.
Please be aware that AUC dose calculations for carboplatin cannot be made on patients with a sex other than M or F.
Appointments
Change to duration of appointment retains any custom (user-entered) duration on start time change
When you edit an appointment start time, the system would previously recalculate the appointment end time from the standard duration on the visit type. Now if you have previously saved the appointment with a custom (not default from visit type) duration, it will now move the end time in line with your custom duration.
The end time will still set from the default for that visit type on a brand new appointment so this change only affects previously saved appointments where you have manually changed the appointment length to vary from the default.
Appointment history popup from Record Summary - The quick links from the Appointments grid on the Record Summary to View Appointments or View Cancelled appointments now both also display the Visit Type in a column as well as the Resource if applicable.
Referrals
There is now an organisation preference to hide referrals that are Closed from the dropdown lists to reduce the risk of selecting a referral that has been closed on a new appointment. The closed referral if preivously added will be present however if you are creating a new appointment, new visit, new waitlist entry or adding a referral via the patient demographics page, the list of available referrals for that patient will not include any previously closed ones.
See below for the organisation preference that will enable this for your users.
Billing System
IMPORTANT - we are releasing a new version of eClaims. EpiSoft now has Notices of Integration to support claims for Radiation Oncology and Anaesthetists as well as ensure our Australian Immunusation Register module is within acceptable version to maintain our Medicare linkages. As such, we are releasing a new version of our electronic claiming system eClaims - this means we will have new secure links issued by Medicare that are going Live.
Therefore please carefully monitor your first few claims on day after release to ensure that there are no errors connecting to Medicare and notify us ASAP if any issues.
Medicare card ineligible - improve warning visibility - this warning previously appeared on the billing tab at time of claim submission which is Just Too Late to see if you can amend it. If the contract selected requires a Medicare card, the warning message will now appear as soon as you create the account and select a contract. As per previously, this is still only a warning and will not prevent claim submission as Medicare will pay some claims on cards with some validity issues - so if you cannot resolve Medicare card eligibility issues prior to claim submission, please proceed to submit and check any responses back from Medicare in this regard also.
Compliance of Bulk Bill Assigment of Benefits - We now have a new Assignment of Benefits Compliance Report to help track patients that have been bulk billed that not got a signed their Bulk Bill Assignment of Benefits form or DVA Assigment of Benefits Form, we can enable the document categories for these.
If you print these and have the patient sign them then scan them, you can then upload them in the Visit Documents tab and the Assignment of Benefits will be able to report on any visits in a date range that have a bulk bill account that is missing these uploaded documents. Please log a Help Desk ticket if you would like this feature enabled.
Please make that in the Help Desk ticket you include the list of roles in your Organisation that you want to be able to see the Compliance report - see below.
Paying in full flag - Onthe billing tab, you need to set the Paying in Full flag according to the contract you select. To reduce people making errors on this selection/forgetting to reset, the system will now guess at the appropriate Paying in Full setting based on the contract selected. The rules are on creating of a new account if you select Medicare private outpatient contract, this will set to Paying in Full - Yes. As will self pay contracts. For DVA, Bulk Bill and inpatient services that are privately insured, patient Paying in Full will be set to No. If you have a policy of charging private outpatients only the Gap (pay via claimant) then you will need to change your private Medicare outpatient services to Paying in Full No.
Claim submission validator on maximum claim amount - Medicare has an upper limit of $9999.99 for a claim submission. Any claim exceeding this will now validate to prevent submission beyond the maximum.
Payment method copy forward - to save some extra keystorkes of billing staff, the system will now remember the patient's preferred payment method from the previous account where a payment was made. Staff can of course change this if it is incorrect but if the patient routinely pays using the same method this will save staff selecting the same payment method every time for the same patient.
Copy forward admission coding from a similar visit (resaon and type)
For inpatient admissions, the Admission Coding page has had a Copy from Previous button. If you wish to have a selection of past visits to copy from, rather than always choosing the immediate past visit, your site Administrator can set this up in the Organisation Preferences page after which you will get a popup page showing past 10 x visits with admission coding data so you can copy the best match visit from a short list of past visits (with coding).
To enable this feature, set the below tick in the Organisation Preferences page.
Order of services on the billing tab - change to display order as added - for certain claim types, the order of services submitted is important. The services page previously showed the services ordered by service code however it now shows the order of services as they are added so that if there is any issue with a claim related to services in the order you can reverse the invoice and add the services in the order that the insurer requires. As mentioned, this only impacts a limited number of services.
Informed Financial Consent - we now have a module for you to create a template for your informed financial consent and to generate this on the billing tab. This is only avaialble for inpatient visits and can be accessed via the $ sign on the Appointment List if the patient has been preadmitted. You can add the services in advance and generate an IFC document for the patient.
1. Acess the IFC template setup under Organisation Preferences - Custom Patient Print Templates
2. Setup and save the IFC template
3 Create the services that need to be recorded on the Billing tab by preadmitting the inpatient appointment and access via the $ sign on the Appt List
4 Click Billing Documents tab to generate IFC
Send invoices, receipts, IFCs and assorted other billing Docs via email - before using this feature for a specific patient, please ensure you have patient permission to send documents via email. Some invoices and receipts may contain sensitive information and email may be regarded as an insecure communication method by some of your patients. EpiSoft's patient portal epi-me is available to organisations that wish to send sensitive documents to the patient more securely.
If the patient consent to receive email checkbox on the patient demographics page is not checked, this feature will not be enabled for that patient.
1. Contact EpiSoft help Desk needs to set this up for you. Please provide the role/s that you wish to enable the email message template setup. These may be the same roles that setup your reminder and letter templates.
2. If you have this access, you will be able to set up the Patient Comms message templates under System Administration >> Patient Comms
3. Create template
4 Sample template content
5. Send to patient
Maintain Services - Search function added - The Master Services list has become difficult to navigate for sites with a large number of services codes. So a search function has been added to the page with the parameters shown in the screenshot below:
Services not submitted on claim
You can now flag a service on an otherwise submittable claim as a service that should not get submitted - this is a service that is chargeable to the insurer, Medicare or DVA bbut may be chargeable to the patient. This is different to the $0 Info Only services that funds require to be submitted as part of the claim. These services can be chargable to the patient for example pharmacy or other ad hoc items that the private health fund does not cover.
This will save you having to create an ad hoc visit and separate account to bill services that the patient needs to pay that could otherwise go on the same account as the one you are submitting to Medicare, DVA or the health fund.
There are two steps to set up services of this kind:
1 - Create the services in the Services Master
2. Set the charge if applicable for this service on the relevant contract - it will auto tick as no submit in the contract services grid but you can change it at the contract level as well as edit the provider charge if need be
3. After this service is added to an account it will show with the icon below so you know it is a service that can be charged to the patient but will not be submitted to the Payor.
Aged Accounts report - major changes have been made to this report so the data is warehoused and can run faster thereby enabling an All Sites option for the search.
Refunds/Reversals report (new) - there is a new report to track refunds and reversals.
Limitations on refund amounts and Refunds/Reversals (new report)
If you wish to set a policy over refund limits, you can now set this in the organisation preferences. If you do wish to use this contact the Help Desk to let us know what roles you wish to be enabled to exceed the refund limit without warning.
If you wish to enable refund limit review add a value to this field in Organisation Preferences (leave blank if you have no limit / no policy)
Any staff member refunding without this role-right will get a warning but they can still proceed with the refund. However this will show up in the Reversals/Refunds report as a refund requiring review/approval by a more senior staff member.
The Reversals Report will then show as below
Provider override charge - new reasons. If editing a provider charge in the billing tab (ie overridding the charge that is in the contract), the list of reasons was limited. We have added Discount and Other to the dropdown list and if Other selected you can enter a reason not otherwise listed. If there are any reasons you are having to enter as Other frequently please let us know and we will add to the dropdown list.
Add additional text to the invoice - the option to add additional text to the invoice was previously accessible only to only those users who had the permission to edit the invoice date.
These functions have now been separated so users who have ability to edit the invoice date OR where the organisation preference is set to additional text on the invoice will get popup to add additional text before generating the invoice. This may mean more users have access to this popup so please ensure your clerical staff are aware of what this popup is for in accordance with your organisation's policy for additional text.
And importantly if you wish to confirm which roles in your org have the permission to backdate or alter an invoice date (which should be strictly limited to senior staff), please ask the Help Desk to confirm which roles in your organisation have this permission.
Bug fixes
Appointments
Editing the visit type in Edit Appointment page versus editing visit type in Edit Protocol (appointment popup) page could sometimes result in Visit Type out of synch issues between protocol screen and appointment screen - this has been resolved.
Billing
Master services field length validator - adding a master service had a field length validator on the service code that displayed too soon and when not required. There is an 11 character field length limit set on services for prosthesis, pharmacy and miscellaneous so the validation will display if you select one of those service types but not for medical or other not applicable service types
Contract services duplicate service check - when adding a service to a contract, the contract page does not allow you to save the same field (same code and same description) twice. However there was a bug where if you deleted the duplicate service, it would not delete properly and would raise the validation error again. This has been resolved.
Billing documents tab - for inpatient medicare where bulk bill was selected, the wrong BIlling Documents were displaying - it will now show the Medicare Bulk Bill documents rather than the inpatient hospital claim documents.
Debtors' Management page - some combinations of search filters on Debtors' Management were not returning expected records. This has been resolved
There was a bug with invoice generation where on occasion it would display the bank account details on a fully paid invoice instead of Payment received with thanks. This has been resolved
BIllling tab proforma button - this button has been removed from the billing tab as it was no longer in use and resulted in an error in some cases to make space for new buttons.
Bug on claim submit - on claim submit, the system would flash up the entitlement section briefly before submission of the claim. This has been resolved.
Referral expiry matching visit date - If a referral expiry was the same as a visit date, if that visit was created with a visit time, then the referral would be invalid. This has been resolved where if you create an ad hoc visit with a visit time, the referral will be valid for that day also.
Inpatient certificate popup - this page was missing the patient demographics which are now visible in this popup.
New Features
Security
This major release includes the ability to support Single Sign On via a customer managed authentication system for staff. This is as an alternate to 2 Factor Authentication which EpiSoft users use now. This is an all or nothing option for all staff and visiting clinicians in a given organisation who will all be required to login using your facility's managed method if enabled.
Your system administrator will still need to setup and credential usesin the EpiDirectory system BUT if you revoke that user's access in your facility's authentication system, they will no longer have access to EpiSoft without having to revoke them in EpiDirectory as well.
If your organisation wishes to use this user authentication method, it will involve a a fee for setup and release of the URL and removal of all staff passwords so they cannot access EpiSoft without going through your managed Login system. If this group includes nursing staff who need to sign the medication chart, then they must first set up p;in numbers in their user preferences page.
Demographics - preferred pronoun new optional field
Preferred pronoun is now an optional field in the patient demographics page and will appear in their demographics if entered. See below
Demographics - no fixed address
1. This can be enabled as an organisation preference
2. See below as to where it shows on the demographic page if enabled
If ticked it will set all the address fields to read-only and clear all values entered in the address fields.
Hospital Booking Wizard now has additional options for Sex
If your organisations uses the Hospital Booking Wizard, cutdown demographic form, the options for sex are now aligned to the demographics page instead of just supporting an M/F radio button.
Please be aware that AUC dose calculations for carboplatin cannot be made on patients with a sex other than M or F.
Appointments
Change to duration of appointment retains any custom (user-entered) duration on start time change
When you edit an appointment start time, the system would previously recalculate the appointment end time from the standard duration on the visit type. Now if you have previously saved the appointment with a custom (not default from visit type) duration, it will now move the end time in line with your custom duration.
The end time will still set from the default for that visit type on a brand new appointment so this change only affects previously saved appointments where you have manually changed the appointment length to vary from the default.
Appointment history popup from Record Summary - The quick links from the Appointments grid on the Record Summary to View Appointments or View Cancelled appointments now both also display the Visit Type in a column as well as the Resource if applicable.
Referrals
There is now an organisation preference to hide referrals that are Closed from the dropdown lists to reduce the risk of selecting a referral that has been closed on a new appointment. The closed referral if preivously added will be present however if you are creating a new appointment, new visit, new waitlist entry or adding a referral via the patient demographics page, the list of available referrals for that patient will not include any previously closed ones.
See below for the organisation preference that will enable this for your users.
Billing System
IMPORTANT - we are releasing a new version of eClaims. EpiSoft now has Notices of Integration to support claims for Radiation Oncology and Anaesthetists as well as ensure our Australian Immunusation Register module is within acceptable version to maintain our Medicare linkages. As such, we are releasing a new version of our electronic claiming system eClaims - this means we will have new secure links issued by Medicare that are going Live.
Therefore please carefully monitor your first few claims on day after release to ensure that there are no errors connecting to Medicare and notify us ASAP if any issues.
Medicare card ineligible - improve warning visibility - this warning previously appeared on the billing tab at time of claim submission which is Just Too Late to see if you can amend it. If the contract selected requires a Medicare card, the warning message will now appear as soon as you create the account and select a contract. As per previously, this is still only a warning and will not prevent claim submission as Medicare will pay some claims on cards with some validity issues - so if you cannot resolve Medicare card eligibility issues prior to claim submission, please proceed to submit and check any responses back from Medicare in this regard also.
Compliance of Bulk Bill Assigment of Benefits - We now have a new Assignment of Benefits Compliance Report to help track patients that have been bulk billed that not got a signed their Bulk Bill Assignment of Benefits form or DVA Assigment of Benefits Form, we can enable the document categories for these.
If you print these and have the patient sign them then scan them, you can then upload them in the Visit Documents tab and the Assignment of Benefits will be able to report on any visits in a date range that have a bulk bill account that is missing these uploaded documents. Please log a Help Desk ticket if you would like this feature enabled.
Please make that in the Help Desk ticket you include the list of roles in your Organisation that you want to be able to see the Compliance report - see below.
Paying in full flag - Onthe billing tab, you need to set the Paying in Full flag according to the contract you select. To reduce people making errors on this selection/forgetting to reset, the system will now guess at the appropriate Paying in Full setting based on the contract selected. The rules are on creating of a new account if you select Medicare private outpatient contract, this will set to Paying in Full - Yes. As will self pay contracts. For DVA, Bulk Bill and inpatient services that are privately insured, patient Paying in Full will be set to No. If you have a policy of charging private outpatients only the Gap (pay via claimant) then you will need to change your private Medicare outpatient services to Paying in Full No.
Claim submission validator on maximum claim amount - Medicare has an upper limit of $9999.99 for a claim submission. Any claim exceeding this will now validate to prevent submission beyond the maximum.
Payment method copy forward - to save some extra keystorkes of billing staff, the system will now remember the patient's preferred payment method from the previous account where a payment was made. Staff can of course change this if it is incorrect but if the patient routinely pays using the same method this will save staff selecting the same payment method every time for the same patient.
Copy forward admission coding from a similar visit (resaon and type)
For inpatient admissions, the Admission Coding page has had a Copy from Previous button. If you wish to have a selection of past visits to copy from, rather than always choosing the immediate past visit, your site Administrator can set this up in the Organisation Preferences page after which you will get a popup page showing past 10 x visits with admission coding data so you can copy the best match visit from a short list of past visits (with coding).
To enable this feature, set the below tick in the Organisation Preferences page.
Order of services on the billing tab - change to display order as added - for certain claim types, the order of services submitted is important. The services page previously showed the services ordered by service code however it now shows the order of services as they are added so that if there is any issue with a claim related to services in the order you can reverse the invoice and add the services in the order that the insurer requires. As mentioned, this only impacts a limited number of services.
Informed Financial Consent - we now have a module for you to create a template for your informed financial consent and to generate this on the billing tab. This is only avaialble for inpatient visits and can be accessed via the $ sign on the Appointment List if the patient has been preadmitted. You can add the services in advance and generate an IFC document for the patient.
1. Acess the IFC template setup under Organisation Preferences - Custom Patient Print Templates
2. Setup and save the IFC template
3 Create the services that need to be recorded on the Billing tab by preadmitting the inpatient appointment and access via the $ sign on the Appt List
4 Click Billing Documents tab to generate IFC
Send invoices, receipts, IFCs and assorted other billing Docs via email - before using this feature for a specific patient, please ensure you have patient permission to send documents via email. Some invoices and receipts may contain sensitive information and email may be regarded as an insecure communication method by some of your patients. EpiSoft's patient portal epi-me is available to organisations that wish to send sensitive documents to the patient more securely.
If the patient consent to receive email checkbox on the patient demographics page is not checked, this feature will not be enabled for that patient.
1. Contact EpiSoft help Desk needs to set this up for you. Please provide the role/s that you wish to enable the email message template setup. These may be the same roles that setup your reminder and letter templates.
2. If you have this access, you will be able to set up the Patient Comms message templates under System Administration >> Patient Comms
3. Create template
4 Sample template content
5. Send to patient
Maintain Services - Search function added - The Master Services list has become difficult to navigate for sites with a large number of services codes. So a search function has been added to the page with the parameters shown in the screenshot below:
Services not submitted on claim
You can now flag a service on an otherwise submittable claim as a service that should not get submitted - this is a service that is chargeable to the insurer, Medicare or DVA bbut may be chargeable to the patient. This is different to the $0 Info Only services that funds require to be submitted as part of the claim. These services can be chargable to the patient for example pharmacy or other ad hoc items that the private health fund does not cover.
This will save you having to create an ad hoc visit and separate account to bill services that the patient needs to pay that could otherwise go on the same account as the one you are submitting to Medicare, DVA or the health fund.
There are two steps to set up services of this kind:
1 - Create the services in the Services Master
2. Set the charge if applicable for this service on the relevant contract - it will auto tick as no submit in the contract services grid but you can change it at the contract level as well as edit the provider charge if need be
3. After this service is added to an account it will show with the icon below so you know it is a service that can be charged to the patient but will not be submitted to the Payor.
Aged Accounts report - major changes have been made to this report so the data is warehoused and can run faster thereby enabling an All Sites option for the search.
Refunds/Reversals report (new) - there is a new report to track refunds and reversals.
Limitations on refund amounts and Refunds/Reversals (new report)
If you wish to set a policy over refund limits, you can now set this in the organisation preferences. If you do wish to use this contact the Help Desk to let us know what roles you wish to be enabled to exceed the refund limit without warning.
If you wish to enable refund limit review add a value to this field in Organisation Preferences (leave blank if you have no limit / no policy)
Any staff member refunding without this role-right will get a warning but they can still proceed with the refund. However this will show up in the Reversals/Refunds report as a refund requiring review/approval by a more senior staff member.
The Reversals Report will then show as below
Provider override charge - new reasons. If editing a provider charge in the billing tab (ie overridding the charge that is in the contract), the list of reasons was limited. We have added Discount and Other to the dropdown list and if Other selected you can enter a reason not otherwise listed. If there are any reasons you are having to enter as Other frequently please let us know and we will add to the dropdown list.
Add additional text to the invoice - the option to add additional text to the invoice was previously accessible only to only those users who had the permission to edit the invoice date.
These functions have now been separated so users who have ability to edit the invoice date OR where the organisation preference is set to additional text on the invoice will get popup to add additional text before generating the invoice. This may mean more users have access to this popup so please ensure your clerical staff are aware of what this popup is for in accordance with your organisation's policy for additional text.
And importantly if you wish to confirm which roles in your org have the permission to backdate or alter an invoice date (which should be strictly limited to senior staff), please ask the Help Desk to confirm which roles in your organisation have this permission.
Bug fixes
Appointments
Editing the visit type in Edit Appointment page versus editing visit type in Edit Protocol (appointment popup) page could sometimes result in Visit Type out of synch issues between protocol screen and appointment screen - this has been resolved.
Billing
Master services field length validator - adding a master service had a field length validator on the service code that displayed too soon and when not required. There is an 11 character field length limit set on services for prosthesis, pharmacy and miscellaneous so the validation will display if you select one of those service types but not for medical or other not applicable service types
Contract services duplicate service check - when adding a service to a contract, the contract page does not allow you to save the same field (same code and same description) twice. However there was a bug where if you deleted the duplicate service, it would not delete properly and would raise the validation error again. This has been resolved.
Billing documents tab - for inpatient medicare where bulk bill was selected, the wrong BIlling Documents were displaying - it will now show the Medicare Bulk Bill documents rather than the inpatient hospital claim documents.
Debtors' Management page - some combinations of search filters on Debtors' Management were not returning expected records. This has been resolved
There was a bug with invoice generation where on occasion it would display the bank account details on a fully paid invoice instead of Payment received with thanks. This has been resolved
BIllling tab proforma button - this button has been removed from the billing tab as it was no longer in use and resulted in an error in some cases to make space for new buttons.
Bug on claim submit - on claim submit, the system would flash up the entitlement section briefly before submission of the claim. This has been resolved.
Referral expiry matching visit date - If a referral expiry was the same as a visit date, if that visit was created with a visit time, then the referral would be invalid. This has been resolved where if you create an ad hoc visit with a visit time, the referral will be valid for that day also.
Inpatient certificate popup - this page was missing the patient demographics which are now visible in this popup.
| Tags |
|---|
