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Hi, all,

 
I just wanted to briefly summarize the ground we've covered since July - and when I say we - I mostly mean YOU, because you all have done a fantastic job figuring out Therapist Helper for scheduling, billing, and demographics! I also wanted to offer some thoughts for actual implementation.
 
 
Summary of Progress Made
 
In the first two meetings or so, Agency staff did a needs analysis, took a careful look at the current way the Agency does business, and came up with a list of test scenarios and library setups to run through a Therapist Helper test environment.. In setting up the test environment Agency staff learned that there is a free upgrade to Therapist Helper and more online training - which is available through Therapist Helper's paid support plan. Getting ahead of myself a bit, I think it might be good for all Agency staff to review and take any new training - now that they have had ample opportunity to explore and learn about Therapist Helper on their own.
 
Getting back to the summary of progress made,  Agency staff have been tweaking and running test scenarios through Therapist Helper. In the debriefing sessions, it has become clear that they have made significant progress in answering many of their own questions and understanding how to make Therapist Helper work for Agency billing and accounting. They clarified the Agency fee schedule for the Therapist Helper Libraries. They have decided to have only two versions of each service in their Service Library - one with the Agency standard fee attached to it for self-pay and insurance clients, and one with a zero fee attached to it for clients who are covered under a grant such as DFC or SOMM. The Agency will use Therapist Helper to bill and track balances for the first group of clients, and will export into Excel and attach fees there to bill the grants for the second group of clients. By not maintaining the actual grant fees in Therapist Helper, Agency staff will not have to individually apply back payments when a mass grant payment is received. This would be a very time-consuming task and one they currently do not have to do. The one exception to having two versions for each service is the "No Show Fee" which the grants do not cover. It should be added as further explanation, Agency staff have discovered that they can export groups of charges to Excel by setting up the grants in Therapist Helper's Account Library, attaching the Client's Face Sheet to the correct grant in the Account Library, and then using Therapist Helper's reporting features to filter out the clients based on Account.
 
Agency staff have made additional important breakthroughs such as discovering how to add beginning balances (for when the system goes live) and how to have Therapist Helper prompt for pre-authorization for different insurances such as Medicare/Medicaid.
 
In a parallel initiative, Agency staff have made contact with Therapist Helper's technical support and have been refining a list of questions to ask in a conference call at some point in the future. Some of the questions are as follows:
 
How do you get a self-defined ethnicity field to show up in reports and exports?
Can Therapist Helper also prompt for when 90 Day Reports are due for Medicare and Medicaid?
What is the difference between the Write-Off field and the Adjustments tab in the Client's Face Sheet and which would be best to use for the sliding fee scale?
 
 
Work that remains to be done
 
J and D are to the point of writing up procedures for setting up the Client's Face Sheet in Therapist Helper. Creating this type of Documentation is a very important step. When they have finished, I can, if you all would like, review it from an educational and instructional materials perspective for creating job aids. 
 
We need to clarify whether we can pull out all the information we need based solely on Account, and leave the reponsible party fields to be used A critical piece that still needs to happen is that Agency staff need to actually create the various grant invoices from the Therapist Helper exports. There is a two-fold purpose for this:
 
(1) Agency staff must see if they can pull all the information that they need out of Therapist Helper and determine what all is involved in preparing a grant invoice from a Therapist Helper export. A question that remains to be answered is whether groups of charges can be exported solely on Account, leaving the Responsible Party fields in the Face Sheet to be used as they were actually intended. It's my opinion at this point that they can, but this needs to be verified.
 
(2)The various granting agencies need to see the invoices and give feedback as to what is acceptable to them. This negotiating may take some time so this needs to be done soon, if we are looking at a January 1 implementation date.
 
Looking ahead to implementation, we probably should develop a schedule for implementation (I visualize this as another white-board, brain-storming meeting initially) - and a very critical part of that schedule is installing the Therapist Helper upgrade and allowing a time to go through training and to "play with/test" the new version. Would it be possible to set up the upgrade in a test environment before going live with it? Even if it's on a standalone machine not connected to the network.
 
See you all on Thursday at 1p!
 
Jeanne