Jane's Blog Tips, News, and Thoughts from the Jane Team

Some changes arriving this April!

March 30, 2018

We have appreciated all of the fantastic feedback and support you offer Jane as a community of users, and we’ve spent time talking and visiting with many of you as we develop these new insurance and billing features.

We will be flipping on some new insurance features over the coming weeks and you will likely notice a few changes throughout Jane’s insurance billing features and workflows.

Deep breaths everybody. We know that change is hard.

We are already so grateful for your regular feedback and we’d love to hear your thoughts on these changes too. They have been carefully thought out to accommodate the complex and varied insurance workflows of our tens of thousands of practitioners. And while our goal is always simple and helpful, insurance as a whole certainly puts the simple goal to the test!

We’ve spent a lot of time re-thinking and re-building Jane’s insurance tracking internals to be more compatible with more insurers and to support more insurance concepts such as co-pays, deductibles, under-payments and coordination of benefits. It’s been a large re-write of much of the billing side of Jane and we’re pretty excited about the flexibility it’s provided in how Jane can handle insurance billing and integrate directly with insurance companies around the world.

Some of the changes you’ll notice right away, and some we’ll be enabling in the coming weeks. Here’s some notes about what to expect.

New Insurance Area

Jane’s insurance area on the appointment panel has a new design to accommodate the many new features. You’ll notice a few new capabilities right away:

  • Copy Last Visit When you add a “Claim / Policy” to an appointment or product purchase, you’ll see some new options to copy the insurance settings from a recent visit. Super handy!
  • Bill Patient with Billing Codes Need to create a detailed insurer-able receipt for your cash/private pay patient but don’t know anything about the insurance policy? You can now choose to just Add Billing Codes (independent from a Claim) and Jane will use those to build the invoice for the Patient. The receipt will include all the detail for the Patient to submit to their insurance company themselves.

Changes to be aware of:

  • We’ve renamed some things to be more conventional with the insurance industry. Here’s a list of the new terms:
    • Fee Codes are now called Billing Codes
    • Area of Treatment codes are now called Diagnostic Codes

Receipts

Previously, when an insurer was involved, Jane’s receipts were a bit sparse on detail and didn’t communicate the full story of who is paying what. Jane’s new receipts now communicate the whole story of the original visit price, the amount covered by the insurer, and the amount remaining for the patient to pay. The receipts also explain the insurance coverage when there is a co-pay, deductible, or coinsurance amount involved.

  • Patient receipts will now show the original visit price (as if insurance was not involved) and an additional line for the amount being covered by each insurer.

Insurance and Taxes

Important changes needed for users working with tax and insurers

  • Jane now considers all insurance coverage to happen after tax. Insurance companies think about their payments as reimbursing or sharing the final cost, so you’ll now notice that all taxes are accounted for on the Patient’s invoice. Here’s a guide document we’ve written to help you navigate the workflow changes you’ll need to make to accommodate this update on Insurance and Taxes.

The New Features Coming Soon

The new features listed below in this section will be enabled in the coming weeks. Let us know if you want to be an early adopter and we can flip them on for you sooner.

  • Multiple Billing Codes Per Invoice Jane now allows you to add multiple billing codes and all of these will land on a single invoice, instead of being spread across multiple invoices.
  • Multiple Diagnostic Codes For each billing code you add, Jane now supports multiple Diagnostic codes (formerly called Area of Treatment codes)
  • Co Pay You’ll see a new field to enter a patient’s co pay, typically a fixed amount that a patient is responsible for at each visit.
  • Deductible You’ll also see a field to enter a deductible. This can be a small visit specific deductible (kindof like a copay) or you can use it to enter a large annual deductible remaining.
  • Eligible Amount This is a new concept in Jane for those cases when the insurance company comes back with an amount that is less (or sometimes more 🎉) than what you billed. You can type that number in here and then choose to bill the remaining to the patient or write off the difference.

If you want to learn a little about what all those terms mean you can check out this little explainer video from our friends at Blue Cross: Co-insurance vs Co-pay…What’s the difference?

For our US Customers:

Once the above features are live, we’ll roll these gems out:

  • Super Bills Jane will soon be able to print a super bill with all the relevant info organized in a way for Patients to submit to their insurer.
  • CMS-1500 Jane will soon be able to produce a fully filled out CMS-1500 form.
  • Office Ally Integration Jane will soon be able to produce a BLAH BLAH file compatible with many clearing houses, including Office Ally.

For our Canadian Customers:

All of the changes we’re talking about here were required to make Jane compatible with the direct insurance integrations available in Canada. We’re continuing to develop our integrations with Telus eClaims and Pacific Blue Cross, with more coming later this year.

And some Non-Insurance Changes

As we’ve rebuilt much of Jane’s billing internals, we’ve had the opportunity to make some changes that improve the financial tracking in general.

  • Cash Reconciliation Report Jane has a new report that shows a detailed summary of all payments, refunds, credit, gift cards, that come and go in a given period. We’re happy to receive gifts of chocolate and alcohol from your bookkeepers and accountants.
  • Reporting on Changed Invoices Jane’s invoicing system has been revamped to better track changes over time. So for you Accrual Accounting folk, Jane’s reporting will now incorporate changes to invoices over time and report on this correctly.
  • Re-Printing Past Receipts You’ll see a new Receipts tab your Patient’s Billing areas where you can print or email a past receipt.

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