A payment report lists the payments made, and how they are distributed across the accounts. One payment may be made for a single account, or a payment may be made covering multiple accounts. In the following example, 8 bulk bill claims were paid with a single payment.
Once a payment report is received, the payment details are automatically inserted into the appropriate account. Where multiple accounts are covered by a single payment, the payment is entered as a standard Access Anaesthetics Batch Payment. If a payment report is retrieved more than once, the report retrieval information will be updated, but the payments will not be re-allocated to the account a second time.
If the payment covers the total fee, the account is automatically closed and the status modified appropriately. If the payment only part pays the account, the account is left open and the status is change to "Eclipse - review'. If the account is overpaid by more than $20, the status is set to 'Eclipse - review overpayment'. This is mainly to be able to identify duplicated payments. |
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If a processing report shows that no payment is due, no payment report will be generated.
Payment reports for IMC claims are called Eclipse Remittance Advices or ERAs. It is not possible to retrieve an ERA for a specific claim. Rather, you must transmit a 'Retrieve status' request to see whether any are available for your location. If so, you may then retrieve the ERA in a separate transmission. To retrieve an ERA you must transmit a specific ERA TransactionID which is obtained from a status request, or you may specify dates within which to retrieve ERAs. The Eclipse menu keeps track of the time the last status request was made, and will generate the next status request based on that time. This ensures that you retrieve all ERAs, and that you don't retrieve any specific ERA more than once. It is possible to re-request ERAs for a period of 6 months.
An ERA looks like this ...
Not all health funds provide electronic payment advices (ERAs). For these funds, payment advices will be sent by standard mail, and should be entered into Access Anaesthetics in the normal way on the Payment page.
Multi-provider Note on ERAs. For a standard multi-provider installation of Access Anaesthetics, each ERA may contain multiple payments. Normally these will all be for the same provider and such a payment will be recorded in the appropriate data file as a batch payment. Sometimes, especially where two doctors may share the same bank account, a single ERA may contain payments for more than one doctor. In this case, since a batch payment cannot be spread across multiple providers, the payments are entered as simple (non-batch) payments. To identify these, the text 'MultiDr' is inserted into the Cheque Number field. Viewing such payments will identify matching data from all doctors. However, it is possible to manually delete an individual payment, and if this is done, the multiple payment details may appear unbalanced since one of the payments from the original ERA no longer exists.