MEDITECH Monthly Customer Newsletter

Home Health Group Busy with New Installations, Product Development

Several members of Bob Gale's group are dedicated to developing and supporting our home health product, inSync.

Nineteen new home health customers have joined since June, keeping this group hard at work. "New customers are a mixture of all types and sizes of home health agencies," says Jim Merlin, Director of MEDITECH's Home Health group. "Both standalone agencies and agencies operating in an integrated delivery network are among our new customers."

This month, our home health customers will receive functionality to comply with Medicare's Prospective Payment System (PPS) requirements, which go into effect on October 1. According to this new legislation, patients are assigned to a Home Health Related Group (HHRG) which will calculate appropriate reimbursement amounts. Changes to our billing system and financial reporting were needed to support the regulations.

"This project has been a significant undertaking for the group. The regulations have just recently been finalized and we are now completing the code, testing, documenting, delivering an update and putting together a customer education program in a very short amount of time," explains Merlin. Throughout the development phase, we've worked closely with our home health partner, Patient Care Technology (Atlanta , GA) to ensure all of our software changes integrate with the clinical portion of the system.

In addition to keeping up with new regulations, the group is working on a Durable Medical Equipment (DME) product. The product will offer additional materials management functionality for rental management, point of sale transactions, as well as support Processing Certificates of Medical Necessity (CMN's). The group is also deep in development mode in response to Canadian interest in a Care Manager product. We plan to introduce this product to the Canadian Continuing Care Services market in the upcoming months.