Contact Us:
Horizon Healthware, Inc.
266 W. Millbrook Road, Suite B
Raleigh, NC 27609
919-676-8090
919-676-0725 Fax
info@horizonhealthware.com

Brochure
(PDF) for Providers of Community Support and other Enhanced Benefits
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News and Events
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.
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