A walkthrough of some suggestions for ensuring the highest quality data in your AngelTrack server, and the common pitfalls
AngelTrack gathers mountains of billing data, all of it keyed to patients and facilities. Unfortunately, it is necessary for someone at each agency to curate the patient and facility records to keep them up-to-date, and to remove duplicates that are accidentally created from time to time.
Curating the Facility Records
AngelTrack stores a list of facilities, which are places that frequently serve as the origin and/or the destination of a call. Each facility's record includes its name, address, phone number, fax number, sales and billing contacts, contract information, plus many statistics.
The following datafields must be kept up-to-date:
- HCPCS type
- Billing container, if connected to an H facility
- Billing contact
- Contract status, and the services included by the contract
- Contract prices
Someone must also be responsible for eliminating duplicate facility records that dispatchers may inadvertently create from time to time. Using the Facility Edit page, you can view a list of suspected duplicate facility records. To learn more, read the Facility Records Guide.
Curating the Patient Records
Patient records contain a few billing fields that must be kept up-to-date:
- Key demographic information like SSN and DOB when found to be missing or incorrect (missing data is reported in the Missing Demographics Queue)
- Residence facility, if the patient's transports are covered by a hospice contract
- Insurance information, including back-dated corrections as necessary
- Pricing schedule, if given a personal rate below retail
Lastly, someone must also be responsible for eliminating the occasional duplicate patient records that dispatchers and crews may accidentally create from time to time. Duplicates usually happen when the last name has a strange spelling or when a patient has a maiden name.
AngelTrack provides some assistance in locating and eliminating duplicate patient records. To learn how, read the Duplicate Patient Records Guide.
SSN / Why do EMS and fire providers collect a patient's Social Security Number?
The patient's SSN is used in the following ways in AngelTrack:
- Detection of duplicate patient records
- Search for patient by SSN
- Export of billing data to a collections agency
- Reports to the state trauma registry
Notice that SSNs are not used for insurance claims. They are only used in the case where insurance denies coverage or leaves a copay, and the patient refuses to pay, making it necessary to hand over to a collections agency.
If you would like to adjust the SSN collection requirements in AngelTrack's PCR, visit the Preferences item under Settings.
If you require the collection of SSNs but still wish to allow your crews a workaround for situations where they cannot collect one, then your crews can use any of the following fake inputs:
- 111-11-1111
- 123-45-6789
- 666-66-6666
- 987-65-4321
- 999-99-9999
You could assign different meanings to these numbers, like "111-11-1111" means unable to obtain, while "999-99-9999" means the patient refused to provide it.
Australian Pension Numbers
AngelTrack supports Australian pension numbers.
When running in Australia, AngelTrack configures the "Social Security Number" datafield in each patient record to accept the Aussie pension number format, with or without dashes.
Due to the enormous number of places that the "Social Security Number" datafield is displayed or otherwise reported, AngelTrack does not attempt to rename that field to say "Pension Number," so you must train your crews and billers to use the "Social Security Number" field for this purpose.