RippleDown has the facility to directly update the Ultra Laboratory Information System to indicated whether or not a test can be billed according to Medicare guidelines. (This can also be done where RippleDown is interfaced to other Laboratory Information Systems such as Kestral PLS).

It does this by sending a non-reporting message to Ultra in a specified format, to indicate either NO BILL or BILL for the request panel. (See Ultra billing message for details of how this message is implemented in the Ultra to RippleDown interface).

To use this facility for a particular project, the recommended steps are as follows:

  1. Create a new Report Section with some descriptive name, e.g. Billing. Use the default format option ‘No heading’.
  2. For a case where you want to give the NO BILL instruction, create a comment in this section in the following
    format:<BILLING_FLAG> N | No charge to patient since etc etc

    and add the comment to the report using the appropriate rule. The “<BILLING_FLAG>” indicates that this is a billing comment, and is to be handled separately to  other report comments. the “N” means that the NO BILL flag will be set in Ultra. The “No charge to patient since etc etc” provides the reason why this patient should not be billed. You can provide any text for this. You can use a different reason to create several NO BILL messages.

  3. Similarly, for a case where you want to give the BILL instruction, create a comment in this section in the following format:<BILLING_FLAG> P | Privately charged since etc etc

    and add the comment to the report using the appropriate rule. The “P” means that the BILL flag will be set in Ultra. As before, you can use a different reason to create several BILL messages.

  4. In order to be able to add a billing comment to all reports without affecting auto-validation levels, you can specify that any comment in the new Billing report section should not be considered as regards auto-validation. This is done using the menu Autovalidation | Set Policy and then unchecking the Billing report section (see Setting the policy for auto-validation).

Once you have built the rules to give a billing comment, you can review cases in the Archive case list to check that the billing comments are being given correctly. If you need to add, replace or remove a billing comment, you can do this with rules in exactly the same way as for a reporting comment.