October 8, 2009 -- Scheduling Module Available

Today Horizon rounds out its suite of agency management solutions with the release of an optional Scheduling Module for PROMISE. This simple yet powerful module adds calendar and call center functionality, empowering agencies to increase staff productivity and efficiency. Tightly integrated with PROMISE, the new Scheduling system presents a fast search of employees and patients/clients for easy placement on the intuitive calendar interface; an employee's confirmed schedule flows seamlessly to billing and reports for single-entry generation of claims, receivables, payroll, visit statistics, and productivity analysis. Visit the Products/Scheduling page for more information.

August 19, 2009 -- Two Agencies Choose Horizon With Minimal Sales Effort

In back-to-back July contract signings, Horizon Healthware proves that satisfied customers are a company's best sales force. Horizon is pleased to welcome E Squared Community Services as a new client by way of referral from another Horizon user - and to welcome back the Harnett County Home Health Agency after an unsuccessful attempt at implementing a different vendor's system. Click the link above for the full story in a downloadable PDF file.

June 19, 2009 -- NC Medicaid to Require Electronic Claims and Payments

Like all of our clients who bill NC Medicaid, Horizon is watching closely the North Carolina legislature's debate over potential cuts to the state budget in the health services sector. Now more than ever, it is critical to collect every possible penny of reimbursement (in a timely fashion) and to not exceed authorized service limits. It's a scary time, and the providers who are smart enough to adapt quickly and cheaply will be the ones who weather the storm.

NC DMA announced in the June 2009 Medicaid bulletin that as a cost-cutting measure, soon all Medicaid claims and payments must be handled electronically. If you are currently receiving paper checks from Medicaid, you will need to sign up for "Electronic Funds Transfer", also known as "Automatic Deposit". Instructions are included here in the online Medicaid bulletin.

It's not clear whether the electronic payment requirement also means paper remittance advices (RAs) will be stopped. In case it does turn out that electronic RAs are required, please be aware that Horizon Healthware has a cost-effective software module to handle the download, translation, and printing of electronic remittance files. In light of the Medicaid cuts, even if paper RAs do continue, this may be a smart time to consider switching to electronic RAs. With potential cuts in reimbursement affecting cash flow, it will be more important than ever to shorten the collection cycle and find out about denials as quickly as possible. Getting RAs electronically puts the denial information in the agency's hands several days faster.

On the claim side, many providers are already using the free NCECS "web tool" that lets you type in claims to EDS over an internet connection, a good solution for a low-volume Medicaid agency. For a higher-volume situation, another option is Horizon's Medicaid Electronic Claims system. Our Medicaid module also has the additional feature of Eligibility Verification, which lets you check Medicaid eligibility for all clients at once rather than using the manual phone call verification. This can be used either stand-alone as a replacement for NCECS, or as an add-on to our full billing and management system (PROMISE).

Our PROMISE agency management system provides a full range of tools to track authorizations/certifications, generate claims, track staff time and units, report non-Medicaid services to mental health LMEs, print the Medicaid cost report, manage collections, and much more. Used in combination with the electronic RA module, the system can also save time by actually posting the payments to your client accounts so you don't have to key in payments manually. This frees up valuable staff time for doing follow-up on unpaid claims.

Please be sure to review the June Medicaid bulletin and keep an eye out for the more detailed information that should be in the July edition on the NC DMA site. And if you would like to discuss any of the software tools mentioned here, feel free to call or email us.

October 23, 2008 -- New Features for Behavioral Health Providers

In recent months, Horizon has been contacted by a flurry of agencies who serve clientele with issues related to mental health, substance abuse, and developmental disabilities. These providers of North Carolina Medicaid "Enhanced Benefits" were desperate for help with an overwhelming paperwork burden. They'd been getting by with homemade spreadsheets, entering visit data 2 or 3 places to generate billing and payroll - but the new July 1, 2008 requirement of filing a Medicaid Cost Report was the final straw! They knew there had to be a better way, so they went looking for relief and a comprehensive solution.

Happily, Horizon was able to meet the needs of these frantic providers right away -- having worked for over a decade with home care agencies billing Medicaid CAP-C and CAP MR/DD, and having already enhanced our PROMISE system to address some of their unique reporting requirements when a few community mental health agencies sought us out in 2006.

With our mental/behavioral provider client base suddenly doubled, and realizing that lots of agencies are facing similar difficulty, Horizon Healthware has enacted a commitment to further enhance our systems for the particular needs of mental health providers. In the September PROMISE software release, we enabled pass-through billing to support the situation when the agency provides service and payment goes to the LME. Earlier in 2008, we added a robust Authorization Tracking feature that allows agencies to create and track payor-based rules (like limiting all recipients to a certain number of hours/units) and consumer-specific authorizations (for example, he/she can have 20 hours of service in the next 2 weeks but no more than 3 hours in any one day). PROMISE will print an authorization number on the claim, create multiple claims when authorization is renewed within a billing period, show you where you stand on using the authorized services, and alert you when a cap has been exceeded or a reauthorization is coming due.

Of course, transmission of electronic claims (without any duplicate entry of visits), tracking revenues and receivables, printing the CAP Cost report, checking Medicaid eligiblity for all recipients, counting hours of service provided, exporting staff activities to payroll systems (again - without duplicate data entry), and many other time-saving features, have been part of the core PROMISE system for nearly 25 years. In addition to the recent changes for LME billing and authorization tracking, other enhancements are planned that will make PROMISE an even more valuable tool for mental health and community support providers.

Now that we know how desperately agencies are struggling and how positive Horizon's impact can be, we are delighted to say that we aim to become the software vendor of choice for this industry. See our new brochure (PDF) that identifies the difficulties faced by behavioral service agencies and lists some of the ways that Horizon Healthware's solution can instantly make life a whole lot easier.

April 24, 2008 -- Expansion of Horizon Team with Three Home Care IT Pros

Horizon announces the addition of three long-time home care industry IT experts to the development and customer support staff. Karen Bence, Lisa Davies, and Clint Hopper bring a combined 50 years of relevant system design, development, and support experience to the Horizon Healthware team. Bence, both a developer and a Registered Nurse, has worked extensively with clinical applications; Davies is an expert in billing and reimbursement systems; and Hopper’s experience includes creation of a visit scheduling system. We anticipate an immediate acceleration in Horizon's ability to deliver system enhancements to customers in the ever-changing home and hospice care industries. Click the link above for the full story in a downloadable PDF file.

March 31, 2008 -- ClinicPro Charting Forms Now Include Hospice

Enhancement of the new ClinicPro electronic charting system has continued since its release last year; we recently completed development of hospice-specific charting forms such as Spiritual Assessment, Bereavement Assessment, Patient Problem/Goal/Intervention Careplan, and a hospice Visit Note. A current PROMISE-user agency has volunteered to be the first to implement ClinicPro for Hospice, with training to take place in early April.

October 9, 2007 -- New Point-of-Care Clinical Software Unveiled

After a 4-year redevelopment effort, Horizon is pleased to announce that the new ClinicPro system is fully operational for home health visit notes and OASIS collection. Designed for tablet PCs and utilizing Microsoft's .Net technology, ClinicPro provides clinicians a completely intuitive electronic charting system with screens that look exactly like the forms they already know. The clinicians who now use ClinicPro every day for their "paperwork" are loving the time and paper saved, and both they and their agency supervisors report that the transition from paper to electronic charting was much easier than they imagined because of the unique approach Horizon employed with ClinicPro.

July 7, 2006 -- Release of Santrax Telephony Interface

Horizon clients can now use telephones to capture visit data for billing. In early July, Horizon Healthware's PROMISE billing system successfully processed visit activity that was captured by Santrax, a telephony product offered by Sandata Technologies, Inc. Home care agency employees call a toll-free number when they arrive at the patient's home to "clock in", and call again as they leave to enter codes for their activities and "clock out". The Santrax system stores this activity in a file that PROMISE imports as visit transactions, with all necessary data fields such as personnel number, patient number,visit code, and visit time having been captured by telephone. From there, the time and visit data is processed the same as if it were keyed in through the daily or calendar entry screens of PROMISE, with minutes/hours converted to units as appropriate for Medicaid billing. Visit our products page for more information on this and other cooperative efforts between Horizon and allied vendors bringing seamless "best of breed" solutions to mutual customers.