HI Simon The Medicare office is/has rolling out a sideshow promoting Medicare EFPOS swipe card claims at GP divisions. I attended one recently at Whitehorse WDGP(VIC). The AMA was planning to doing the same! The AMA cancelled the one in Melbourne 'claiming lack of interest'- I personally know of many people who registered to go to the AMA event so I assume the AMA is backing off support for this due to the numbers of its members very unhappy with this.
At the meeting at WDGP. The nice people from Medicare acknowledged: 1-GAP billing would do this without giving $50 million plus per year to the banks 2- Gap billing is more equitable for privately billed people including the many pensioners and concession card holders who have no access to Bulk billed services. Allows people to see their doctor with only the gap fee- not he entire amount 3- Several hundred Medicare staff will be sacked 4- Practices already using Online patient claims have no benefit in using the new EFPOS swipe card process 5- Medicare is about to spend a lot of money advertising that doctors can use the EFPOS swipe card process. About 10 to 20 million in May June July 2007 (My assumption on the amount!) 6- Only CBA has agreed to provide the service at the .23 cents per transaction meaning that the estimated 50 million paid to the banks per year may increase significantly! Almost all the practices expressed frustration that the new system: 1-Is not integrated with out clinic/admin software systems 2-We will be almost forced to use it or lose customers to large corporate centres or even other practices who do use it 3- Increase our work load with no benefit except for paper based claiming practices- (I would love to know how many of these actually still exist) 4- $50 million or more per year paid to the banks for something we can/could do is a shocking waste of taxpayer's money It was a very interesting to see almost everyone at the meeting agreed on most if not all the above including two of the three Medicare staff. Honesty rather than the waffle from the guff used to prompt the swipe card was very appreciated. I hope this is of use to you. Regards James Bishop Longevity Medical Ph 03 98482009 Fax 03 98407064 Mb 0413582615 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Simon James Sent: Friday, 13 April 2007 9:42 AM To: GPCG Talk Subject: [GPCG_TALK] Electronic Medicare Claiming / EasyClaim Dear All, I'm commencing research on the new Electronic Medicare Claiming (EasyClaim) system and will be interviewing some folks from Medicare in the coming days. I'm posting to see if list members have any outstanding questions or concerns about the proposed system, which will assist me to research and prepare a comprehensive article for release in my May edition. In terms of currently available info, I expect most would be aware of Medicare's website: http://www.medicare.gov.au/providers/programs_services/medicare/electronic-c laiming.shtml As well as some basic info, this site contains has a video that outlines the following scenarios: Paying Patients --------------- 1. Practice generates invoice. 2. Patient pays with cash/cheque/eftpos 3. Receptionist swipes EFTPOS card 4. Receptionist enters "some basic information", "5-keystrokes or less". 5. EFTPOS terminal sends info to Medicare Australia 6. Medicare Australia sends EFTPOS terminal approval message. 7. Patients "bank debit card" is swiped. 8. EFTPOS terminal prints receipt and money is transferred to patient. Bulk Bill Claims ---------------- 1. Medicare card swiped. 2. "Information entered into the keypad" by patient. 3. Patient approves benefit to the doctor by pressing "OK". 4. Receipt printed for patient. I've dredged out some questions and comments from previous posts relating to this subject (hopefully the context is obvious): Q) How many more? What is the minimum number and what is the maximum number of keystrokes that specialists' staff will have to enter? Q) Why only on the next working day and not within the next minute? What prevents payment within the next minute? Q) As a patient, how do I know that my consultation details (demographics, medicare no, Items claimed, etc) are not being harvested at the POS by an Insurance Company affiliated with the bank? Comment) Also one of the set of keystrokes is obviously the item number, so there is lots of potential for data entry errors, and there is no information about how they'd be handled. Do you need the patient to swipe their card again, as its obviously the confirmation that the patient is involved in the process? Comment) What is missing from this list is where the patient pays the gap or some lesser portion of the bill: this is neither a "paid patient claim" nor an "unpaid account" as described on the Medicare page. Presumably the patient pays the gap, possibly by credit or debit card (one swipe) and then swipes his or her Medicare card to get the Medicare benefit cheque generated (2 swipes). Comment from me) I note that this week, NAB joined CommBank as the (only 2?) banks signed on for the scheme. Does anyone have any more to add? Thanks, Simon _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
