Covid-19 Vaccine - Admin/Billing

Hello,

 Is anyone's practice giving the Covid-19 vaccine to the public?  If yes, we have a couple of administrative and billing questions:

1.) Are you using VAMS for scheduling/reporting?
- If yes, how are you billing for the vaccines?
- Do you manually key in the claims on to the payer website?
*What do you do when payments come into your EMR, but there are no claims to post this payment to?
- Do you enter the patients in your EMR and document their vaccine in order to file the claims?

2.) Do you use your EMR for scheduling/reporting?
- If yes, do you have the capability for people who are not your patients to schedule their vaccine appointment online?

Thank you!

Tune into Chip & Paulie’s webinar tonight as they have a special guest to go over Covid vaccines in the practice:

We started giving vaccines at the beginning of April. However we received them as a transfer from our county health department so the state resources weren’t available to us such as VMS for scheduling. Luckily our EMR (we use eClinicalWorks) is able to do open scheduling and is currently offering it free for 3 months.

  1. We are using our EMR for scheduling and yes we are adding everyone in as a new patient and we are documenting their vaccine in our EMR. At the moment it is not hard to discern who is entered for COVID vaccines and who are actual patients as our first vaccines were Moderna so everyone was 18+. Since we are using our EMR we are submitting all claims through there and using our typical clearinghouse. Our payments have been combined with regular payments so I think it would be more difficult to not have them in our EMR. Once the patient receives their second dose we are inactivating them.
  2. For our EMR, it allows us to have an open access campaign. In that set up we are able to state what visit type to “broadcast” and on each resource we can state what to do if a patient is found and what to do with a patient that isn’t found. If the patient is not found, we an either just create a block on the schedule with patient registration details or we can create an appointment and automatically register the patient. Since we are required to accept everyone regardless of whether they are a patient, we have ours set up to automatically register the patient. We found it was a lot less work and they were able to get the immediate appt confirmation so they knew they were booked.

Happy to discuss further offline if you also use eCW as there were a lot of nuanced details to the process that weren’t streamlined. My email is chomick@hilliardpeds.com.

Cathy

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