FAQ: My Billing forms are not printing quite right

Most work with billing forms can be directly done on the Billing Batch Detail screen.

This form shows all bills for a given billing batch. You can move to a different billing batch by using the VCR control buttons in the top of the program.

If you scroll to the right by using the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, you can see the form time that is going to be used to print each bill:

There are typically four different kinds of problems that can occur in billing:

Problem 1: The wrong billing form is used for a bill

This can be corrected for individual bills by just selecting a different billing form on the popup, as shown on the screen:

If you find that all forms for that carrier are printing on the wrong form, go to the Carrier Form and you can specify there what form to use for that carrier:

All bills that you generate from now on will go to that form for that carrier.

Problem 2: The information on the printed report does not line up perfectly with the pre-printed forms.

There are many different types of printers available for Windows Computers and they may differ slightly in how they position information on a printed sheet.because the information on a HCFA the form needs to be lined perfectly, we have made it very easy to correct alignment of forms.

First you need to select a bill that uses that billing form. In this example, the first bill on the screen is selected the with the billing form HCFA General Red 1.7: You can see a small triangle on the left side of the screen to indicate that this is the currently selected bill. That means that all work that we will be doing with the Edit and Align buttons will be done on that form.

Click on the Align button and the following screen will appear:

You can adjust where the information is printing by typing numbers into the different sections on the screen. Notice that positive numbers move the information UP, and negative numbers move it DOWN. You can also enter decimal fractions such as 0.25 where something needs to be moved only a quarter line.

In this example the information at the top of the HCFA form, the patient information, will move one half of a line down. The information at the bottom of the screen will move two lines up. All information on the printout will shift 1.5 positions to the right.

Click the Save Changes button and the system will save these changes for all bills that will use that form type.

If the form is still not printing quite right, you can go back to Align button and enter further alignment information. Notice that all alignment figures that you enter now are in addition to earlier entries you have made on the screen. For example, if only the information at the top needs to move now, only enter that information, the footer will not need to change further, so you can leave it at zero this time, it keeps the +2 from the previous alignment.

Problem 3: Individual fields are not positioned quite right or are not wide enough

Click on the Edit button and the system will show the screen to review the Layout for that Billing form:

Then click on the field that you want to change. The field will be selected and marked by extra dots. In the above example, the Patient's Birthdate is selected as shown here.

To verify what a field is, double-click on it and it will show it's description at the bottom in a window:

To move a selected field on the screen, you can press the Cursor arrow keys, and it will shift slightly each time. You can also use the mouse to move them. Press [Esc] to exit that window.

To make a selected field wider, you can press the Shift-key down, and use the arrow keys left and right to re-size the field.

For example, if a field is not wide enough and shows only the "19" of the century in the detail lines of a form, as in this example:

move it to the left slightly and size it to be wider as shown here:

If you want to change the formula, so that it does not show the century instead, see the next section of this document.

When you have made all changes to alignment and sizing, press Ctrl-W to save the changes to that form.

 

Problem 4: The wrong information is showing in individual fields on the form

This is the most difficult type of problem to fix because the changes in the formulas . If you don't feel comfortable with doing this yourself, call our Support Desk and we will be glad to assist you.

Let's go to this example where it is showing "19" instead of "1999".

Double-click on the field and it will show the formula:

Double-click on the button beside the Expression field and it will show the full formula:

This is probably one of the most complicated formulas in the system.

UPPER(CHRTRAN(STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4),"./,"," "))

The UPPER( ) function makes sure that all data shows in CAPITAL letters.

UPPER(CHRTRAN(STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4),"./,"," "))

Since this is a Year that we are looking at, we don't need that part and can remove it:

CHRTRAN(STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4),"./,"," ")

The CHRTRAN() translates all commas, slashes and periods into spaces.

CHRTRAN(STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4),"./,"," "))

This is also not needed here, so we can remove it. The Year() function takes only the Calendar YEAR of the Visit Date, which is a numeric figure.

STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4)

The STR( function takes the numeric value of the Year and converts it into a 4-character string:

STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4)

BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE is the variable name that the system uses for Billing Line items Visit Dates.

STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4)

We only want to see the RIGHT 2 characters of that 4-digit year. So we type in the following formula:

RIGHT(STR(YEAR(BILLLINE.VISIT_DATE),4),2)

The screen will look like this:

Click the Verify button to ensure that the formula is valid. It will say "Expression is valid" at the bottom of the screen. Click Ok.

To see if the entire form is working, click on View and Preview

Then press Esc to return to this form.

Press Ctrl-W to save the changes and Yes on the Confirm Dialog.

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Here are some other examples for formulas for changes in dates:

This formula shows the Patient's Birth Date with MM/DD/YY format:

DTOC1(PMPAT.BIRTHDATE)

This formula shows the Patient's Birth date with MM/DD/CCYY format:

DTOC2(PMPAT.BIRTHDATE)

This formula shows the Patient's Birth date with MM DD CCYY format. Notice that the / gets replaced with a space:

CHRTRAN(DTOC2(PMPAT.BIRTHDATE),"/"," ")

This formula shows the Patient's Birth date with MMDDCCYY format. Notice that there are no spaces, the slash gets replaced with nothing:

CHRTRAN(DTOC2(PMPAT.BIRTHDATE),"/","")

This formula shows the Patient's Birth date with YYYYMMDD format:

DTOS(PMPAT.BIRTHDATE)