The Electronic Claims Lodgement Information Processing Service Environment allows privately insured hospital patients to pay their doctors bill by lodging a single claim to both Medicare and their insurer.
It also gives the patient warning of any out-of-pocket expenses.
Only 40 per cent of medical specialists have computers and IT infrastructure to support online claiming, compared with over 90 per cent of GPs who use computers in their practices, and almost 100 per cent of pharmacists.
As an incentive, medical specialists in metropolitan areas will receive a one-off $750 payment to cover start-up costs and $1000 for those in rural and remote areas.
In addition, practices will receive an incentive payment of 18 cents every time a claim is sent electronically.
Medicare's executive general manager, business operations, Mark Jackson has been out selling the benefits of the organisation's shift from "cash to e-health" - mainly from improved real-time analysis and compliance.
"The next challenge lies in getting specialists who will be the key provider users of Eclipse into the electronic claiming and, hence, connectivity world," he said.
"The insurance funds are starting to push hospitals to connect as well.
"They stand to gain, as recent advice from one large fund suggests error rates in claims processing drop from around 40 per cent in the case of manual handling with paper transfer and rekeying, to less than 2 per cent once data is transferred electronically."
Mr Jackson said efforts to turn-around doctor support for the troubled Easyclaim system - intended to allow on-the spot claiming from the doctor's surgery and automatic payment into the patient's bank account - are beginning to pay off.
According to Medicare's annual report, Easyclaim payments only accounted for 2 per cent of all GP claim transactions with Medicare. GPs have criticised the system as complex and time-consuming.
But Mr Jackson said the main obstacle to patient claims from the doctor's office - the provision and entry by staff of bank account details - is fading as Medicare actively builds a customer banking information database.
"To date, over 800,000 sets of bank account details have been collected and stored by Medicare," he said.
"This capture of data allows practices to offer e-claiming to their patients without extra work, and for the government it reduces the number of people who need to attend a Medicare office."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Karen Dearne
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 19.11.2008
