February 2004 Newsletter

HARP Quality Check

By: Tom Cronin, Manager of Quality Assurance

2003 was a productive year for the HARP development team. There were four major releases and 28 minor releases of HARP. Enhancements in these releases totaled more than 270, ranging from new systems to critical updates to conform to changing claim submission requirements. Some of the new systems in HARP included CD Reporting Packages, Two Open Accounting Periods, Denial Tracking System, Mass Change Status, and the Allowance Comparison Report. Systems that underwent major enhancements included Collection Parameters, Work Lists, Small Balance Write-off, and the Management Letter.

In this article I wish to highlight two enhancements to HARP. First, the Allowance Comparison Report was recently made available with HARP 2.21. Second, Dynamic Entity Names is currently under development and will be available with the next major release, HARP 2.22.

Allowance Comparison Report

A standard for assessing reimbursement levels has become "Percentage of Medicare Allowable." A new Allowance Comparison Report can now provide a comparison between the contractual allowances from a payer contract to the expected reimbursement amount under the Medicare fee tables or another payer's fee schedule. For example, the report can create a useful comparison between what Medicare will pay and what other insurance companies actually allowed for a certain procedure. The report offers a wide variety of selection options and it will sort and break by receipt source and procedure code. The report is also available in a comma-delimited file for easy import into other applications.

In order to take advantage of this report, you must use HARP's LIRP (Line Item Receipt Post) system and a fee schedule must be loaded into HARP. Quadax is currently working on a program to load Medicare's fee schedule. However, fee schedules can be entered into HARP at anytime as expected reimbursement amounts by procedure code and reimbursement category. For more information on this report, please refer to the HARP Release Notes or contact your Quadax Service Consultant.

Dynamic Entity Names

HARP is a single product that serves the needs of our diverse set of clients. Quadax supports many different medical practices, such as emergency rooms, laboratories, and anesthesia. However, HARP has its own naming conventions for entities, which includes physicians, locations, and reporting entities (departments, specialties, divisions, institutions, and assistant.) To customize HARP and to more closely align terminology for our clients, all these entity names will soon be dynamic. Each client can elect to define a new name or label. For example, rename "Physician" to "Laboratory" and "Division" to "Draw Site" for laboratories. HARP will then replace all the names of these entities with the customized names on screens, reports, and forms. More information will be available in March 2004 when HARP 2.22 will be implemented.