Billing with OnePacs
The OnePacs system provides a convenient means of keeping track of radiology work performed and creating billing invoices regarding this work.
The following concepts are relevant to the billing features within OnePacs:
Study Types - Study types are tags that may be applied to studies for the purpose of categorization, billing, and rules-driven workflow. Study types are similar to procedure codes (e.g. CPT in the U.S.A.)
- Study Fees - Study fees are monetary weights that may be assigned to a study type. Fees may be associated at the facility and/or radiologist level and may be differentiated by case priority and read type.
Creating Invoices
The data export feature of OnePacs is used to export case and billing information for a desired period of time into a spreadsheet format (csv) which is compatible with Microsoft Excel, or any other standard spreadsheet software.
The exported data file can then be opened in a spreadsheet and the data therein organized and sorted appropriately for the generation of invoices or the calculation of funds owed.
Maintaining Confidentiality of Billing Data
While OnePacs maintains strict protocols and procedures for the protection of confidential customer data, nonetheless some clients who wish to take advantage of OnePacs's billing features may not wish to disclose financial information into any third party system. As a means of solving the problem of not wishing to store confidential financial data in a third party system while enjoying full access to the range of billing features available in OnePacs, it is possible for users to 'encode' the financial information input into OnePacs. For example, a group that bills for certain studies in the amounts of $15, $20, and $25, might encode these amounts as $0.10, $0.20, $0.30.
Following export of data from the OnePacs system, the spreadsheet column in question may be converted to its true desired values with search and replace operations.
This process of search and replace for a table of data can be automated by third party utilities, for example, Batch Replace for Microsoft Excel. This third party utility (which requires Microsoft Excel 2003 in order to work) allows users to define a "conversion table" spreadsheet in which the first column of the Excel spreadsheet represents the values to convert from, and the second column represents the values to convert to. This table may be applied in the batch-conversion of files containing the confidential billing data.
For example, the conversion table spreadsheet for the above example, where the amounts of $15, $20, and $25 are represented by $0.10, $0.20, and $0.30 would be as follows:
| $0.1 | $15 |
| $0.2 | $20 |
| $0.3 | $25 |