Launching billOHIP.ca at FMF 2015

Last week we attended the Family Medicine Forum at the Toronto metro convention center where we re-introduced Mo-Billing under its new name billOHIP.ca. While the app has been restructured, billOHIP.ca maintains the same underlying concept of being a communication tool between doctors and billing agents but can now also be used for do-it-yourself billing. The billing software is free and can be used to collect, store, share and submit billing claims. Several new features have been added to further streamline the billing process, making it more efficient for doctors and administrators. The feedback we received at FMF from doctors was very positive. As we now start to introduce billOHIP.ca to doctors we are very excited to hear feedback following the first couple weeks of using the app!

Mo-Billing V3: MOH submission files and reconciliation

We have been working hard on producing the third version of Mo-Billing. The application is just about ready for beta testing. This new version has been completely re-designed to include an improved interface and an efficient workflow for both doctors and billing agents, either to use independently or together. Doctors can electronically submit directly to their billing agent using Mo-Billing so they can review the information, make corrections and submit it to the Ministry of Health (MOH). DIY doctors or billing agents may also use the application independently as a standalone billing software for submission to the MOH.

Several exciting new features have been added to V3, including but not limited to real-time tracking of compensation, auto-saving features, stored patient profiles, error detection, but most importantly the creation of submission files for the MOH and the ability to reconcile on Mo-Billing itself!

Get a sneak peak into V3 here!

What is next? Well, as of right now Mo-Billing does require users to use MC-EDT as our application creates MOH submission files which are then transferred through MC-EDT. We are beginning to work on incorporating submission directly to the MOH through Mo-Billing, no longer requiring the use of MC-EDT.

Keep your eyes peeled for V3 of Mo-Billing!

Series on Mo-Billing 2.0 Features: Messaging system

As we continue with our series on Mo-Billing 2.0 features, next we discuss the Mo-Billing messaging system. The messaging system is intended to allow the doctor and agent pair to simply communicate by sending messages attached to a claim through the application. With bank grade security all messages are secure to highest degree. 

Often times doctors use email to ask questions or give directions to their billing agent, however with email's limited security, doctors are taking a risk in sharing patient information. With Mo-Billing, all information is encrypted and protected in a high security data center. Furthermore, there may be confusion in deciphering to which claim the doctor is referring to through email messaging so avoid emails that look like this: 

Doctor: "Can you add A007 to J. A.'s claim?" 
Billing Agent: "Which J. A.? On which admission? What date?"
Doctor: "Well I don't remember because I handed over all my billing record to you!"

Use Mo-Billing so your messages are attached directly to the claim you are referring to avoiding any confusion and delays, subsequently saving time. 

Series on Mo-Billing 2.0 Features: 4 digit pin lock

We will be featuring a new series on our blog focused on Mo-Billing Version 2.0. With a transition from paper billing to electronic billing, many concerns have been raised as our current and future users venture into untouched territory. The goal of this series is to share and explain implemented features so that our users can be at ease as they transition to an automated billing process. 

Considering that doctors use their mobile phone, tablet or PC at the hospital to capture billing data using Mo-Billing, one concern at the forefront of our their minds is the security and privacy of their patient's information within the heavily populated hospital. For this reason, we have implemented an automatically timed log out mechanism into the Mo-Billing application. Previously in version 1.0 every time users wanted to log back into the program they had to type their email and password, we received complaints that this was too cumbersome as they would log in to the program several times a day.


In our newest version of the app, we have implemented a 4 digit pin lock mechanism. This allows the user to easily log back into Mo-Billing several times throughout the day by typing a unique 4 digit pin. However, after 24 hours of inactivity the user is completely booted out of the system and will be required to enter in their email and password to gain access. 

Implementing the 4 digit PIN allows our users to quickly access Mo-Billing throughout the day while still providing protection to their medical billing data, ensuring others cannot easily access their information if they get a glance or a hold of their mobile phone, tablet or PC.

Ending the silence: Version 2.0 of MO-BILLING

Dear Readers,

We sincerely apologize  for the silence over the past 2 months- we have been hard at work in creating Version 2.0 of Mo-Billing. We are excited to launch the new version today in iTunes and Google Play stores. The new version can also be accessed via the web at jsapp.mo-billing.ca for doctors and jsapp.mo-billing.ca/admin for billing agents. The new version is more intelligent and has increased content for both the doctor and the billing agent.

For those of you unfamiliar with the application it automates the medical billing process for doctors and their billing agents. Doctors are able to electronically collect, store and deliver their claims and billing agents are able to electronically receive and store the claims. Soon Mo-Billing will have direct submission capability to the Ministry of Health. Below we share some screen shots of the new application.

DOCTORS

The Dashboard

Organize all your claims, in one location. The bottom tabs on the dashboard allow you to easily switch between your saved, submitted, rejected and paid claims.

Creating a claim

Have the added flexibility of creating claims for more than one specialty. In your profile specify which templates you want available to you when creating a claim. Then when you create a new claim you can choose which template to use.

Simply take a picture of the patient sticker to record their information. Fill in all other required fields, such as hospital, diagnosis and admission date. All your hospitals and diagnosis codes are pre-loaded into the app.

Enter the admission date, first seen and last seen date so Mo-Billing is able to automatically generate your service codes for you. After entering in the information change pages using the bottom tabs.

For consults, you can choose the type of consult, and indicate any special visit and travel premiums. Certain consults have time limitations- Mo-Billing will let you know if you met the time requirement for certain consults. Also, there are limitations to the number of premiums you can use- Mo-Billing tracks this for you so you know if you've reached a limit.

After entering the details, simply click generate to automatically generate your service codes. You can add or delete codes to certain days or add a new day all together.

Simplify communication. If you have any comments regarding the claim you can leave a comment for your billing agent. Likewise they can leave one for you.

BILLING AGENTS

The Dashboard

Organize all your doctors' claims in one location. For each doctor, keep track of which claims are submitted to the Ministry of Health, paid or rejected.

Viewing Claims

Find what you are looking for quickly. Choose the doctor of interest and the status of the claims you are interested in.

To view a claim click edit and see all the details you would normally receive on paper- right on your screen! Simplify communication. If you have any comments regarding the claim you can leave a comment for the doctor. Likewise they can leave one for you. Update the status of the claim so you and the doctor can keep track of everything.

 That concludes the quick run through of the application. We are continuously working to improve and add content to Mo-Billing to better suit the needs of doctors and billing agents. We are currently working on implementing submission capability to the Ministry of Health. Billing agents will be able to simply review the the information on Mo-Billing and at a click of a button submit it to the Ministry of Health- data transfer to a third party billing software and the software all together will no longer be needed!

Please contact us at info@mo-billing.ca with any questions.

Watch How Mo-Billing Works

We recently finished our 'how-to' videos for Mo-Billing. Check them out!

Family Medicine

You can also watch how Mo-Billing works for:

Internal Medicine/Cardiology

Anesthesiology

Heartbleed scare

Recently, there has been quite a talk about openSSL vulnerability called "Heartbleed". We are well aware of the situation. Our servers are well managed with extra level of security and problematic software is fully patched already. Here is a quote from the server manager:

"Like hundreds of other companies, we were using the affected versions of OpenSSL on our servers. However, none of our servers are accessible from the internet without going through load balancers. This means that even if our load balancers were the target of an attack, none of the code, keys or passwords would be compromised.

All of our servers, load balancers and CDN servers are now fully patched and protected against this security vulnerability.

We also have no reason or evidence to believe that any part of our infrastructure has been exploited for this vulnerability.

However, to avoid any potential risks, we have replaced all of our SSL keys and certificates to ensure no traffic is compromised between our customers and our servers."

We will keep monitoring the situation but at this point, there is no interruption to our service.

Why hospital group practices are interested in Mo-Billing app

We are seeing more interesting development with Mo-Billing; we are negotiating deals with departments in three separate large hospitals in Ontario. One group has started trialing already.

These departments have group practices where doctors share admin resources including the billing clerks. The feedback from the billing clerks so far are unanimous and also consistent with the opinion of other billing agents.

They are excited about getting rid of paper with doctor's hand written information on it. The data is available as soon as the claim is submitted with clear photos. There are no excuse or confusion about lost claim cards. No more faxing, no more filing physical paper.

However, one thing we are surprised with is that, some of these group practices were using courier services to pick up and drop off the stack of claim cards.  Their admin office is often physically located away from the actual hospital, or one admin office is shared between multiple campuses. They are excited with the prospect of eliminating this expense; and one less logistical headache! One less intermediary to lose paper!

We are very excited with on-going adoption of our technology among doctors.

Technology for Doctors on Mo-Billing

On March 27, 2014, Mo-Billing was featured in Technology for Doctors, Volume 5, No. 6. Technology for Doctors is a bi-monthly report on key health IT news for physicians. Visit Technology for Doctors and read the article on Mo-Billing presented as an administrative solution.

Tale of Suzan Bsat and Mo-Billing

Being a co-founder of a business has challenged me in so many ways, continuously teaching me the ins and outs of how to get a start-up off the ground. Since September 2013, our date of incorporation, I have learned so much.

And while sometimes running a business can consume you, as your focus is always on achieving your next move, you must not forget to celebrate the little milestones along the way.

Carleton shares my story:

http://graduate.carleton.ca/2014/grad-student-suzan-bsat-launches-mo-billing/

http://carleton.ca/engineering-design/2014/suzan-bsat-grad-student-entrepreneur-launches-mo-billing/

The Art of Creating How-To Videos

Personally, I think that that being the founder of a start-up is one of the most interesting positions you can have. The reason being that you literally get to experience being every department in a company and while it may be a lot of work, you get exposure to so many new experiences.

Yesterday we worked on creating "How-To" videos for Mo-Billing at Ben Hoskyn Studio. Ben is a Ottawa-based cinematographer, director, and producer- and superb person to work with! Our main focus was recording the voice overs for the videos. After spending a couple hours working solely on the voice overs, I came to realize that I underestimated how much thought is needed in producing voice overs. I thought we would do one or two takes, but we did several. We did versions with different tones, word placement and sentence structure. You could spend a whole day trying to find the perfect way to describe something, the right words to use, the right order of the words and sentences. The total product is yet to be completed. Ben will take the many voice over recordings we did, play around with them and overlay them with different parts of the video- quiet an art!

Remember that your video visually explains a lot, so your voice over is intended to be supplemental to your video. In the end you want the voice over to be as succinct and straight forward as possible for your users.

Producing a "How-To" video to simply and quickly explain how to do something can be challenging but spending a couple hours finding the right words to use and the order to place them are the starting steps.

I've added some pictures of us hard at work!

Mo-Billing Featured by Invest Ottawa

When I started the GrindSpaceXL program at Invest Ottawa one of the first things we were told is: "What you get out of the program depends on what you put into the program". Makes sense.

Simply being a part of the GrindSpaceXL program teaches you how to take a start-up from an idea to product to sales, and everything in between- information that is essential to someone without a business background (such as myself). However, to truly get the most out of the program you need to put what you learn in the classroom to practice. I think of GrindSpaceXL as one of the many university classes I have taken in the past. You sit through class, learn a lot of information, then to make that information stick, you have to do your homework. In our case, our homework is taking the concepts we learn in class and figuring out a way to implement those concepts within our business.

Read about how doing things this way has really paid off for us in the article written by Invest Ottawa:

http://investottawa.ca/insiders-view-grindspacexl-driving-sales-mo-billing/

Mo-Billing For Billing Agents

Most of the time when we blog about Mo-Billing, it is aimed primarily at physicians, so I thought I should write about how the technology could change the billing agent workflow.

While Mo-Billing is aimed at eliminating the use of paper on the front-end for physicians by providing them with a platform to collect, store, deliver and retrieve their billing information we must not underestimate its advantages in the back-end.

For billing agents, they too, are able to eliminate the use of paper and computer ink. Rather than receiving their clients claims by fax or by email, which they must print, they are able to log on to our server and access their clients claims electronically. They are able to organize their clients claims through our electronic system, eliminating the need to physically file physician claims. This could save some serious space, as we have found billing agents can store old claims anywhere from 1-3 years after they have been submitted to the Ministry of Health. Also, we have found that eliminating paper and ink can save a significant amount for a medium-sized billing agency.

Another advantage for the billing agent, is they are able to receive claims on a continuous basis. As soon as the physician finishes the claim and clicks 'submit' the billing agent immediately has access to it. This helps them avoid cramming close to the end of the billing cycle.

Billing agents are valuable to physicians as they have expertise in billing, sometimes getting more money for physicians than they would know to claim on their own. Also, billing agents are great at dealing with claim errors and rejections- often a time-consuming task for physicians.

Hopefully Mo-Billing will provide billing agents with a tool they can use with their clients, which will allow them to stay at pace with our societies technological advancements.

App upgrade!

With the feedback from our new billing agent partners, we have made the next step in the app development! This will enhance physician - billing agent ties and improve the flow of billing data.

• Billing agent account permits exclusive management of their physician clients with a well organized dashboard.
• Physicians can effortlessly choose the billing agent from the user profile menu.

Other improvements:

• We added time based billing for physicians working in anesthesia, surgical assists and psychotherapy.
  
• Polished user profile menu to easily change personal info, including a menu for choosing a billing agent as mentioned above.
  

By the way, we noted that the diagnosis search function was missing a good chunk of diagnoses. This will be updated very soon!

Invest Ottawa Open House

On Feb 13, 2014, we were at the Invest Ottawa Open House. Invest Ottawa (and it's accelerator program GrindSpace XL of which we are part) celebrated its two years of promoting business and job creation in the capital.

 Pil and Suzan with Ontario Labour Minister Yasir Naqvi visiting the open house.

To echo Suzan's entry below, I think last one month with GrindSpace XL has been that of literal acceleration for two green entrepreneurs with only technical backgrounds.

After a month, we are working with multiple billing agents who have signed on to use our app. We are also working with technologically inclined physicians who have confirmed our premise that the app will: 

• make it easy to collect billing data,
• transfer the data to the billing agent securely and immediately with a click of a button, 
• and eliminate worries of losing data, risking non-payment and exposing confidential information.

What a great idea, these accelerators. In Canada we are quite behind compared to Silicon Valley, but it's never too late! I thank the great insight the City of Ottawa and the Province of Ontario had 2 years ago.

Initial Feedback: Family Medicine Job Fair and Family Medicine Forum

The past couple of weeks have been hectic but filled with valuable feedback and experiences.

At the end of October we attended the Ottawa University Family Medicine job fair at Montfort Hospital. This was our first opportunity to share the idea of our Mo-Billing software and accompanying billing agent services with potential customers. Residents visited our booth and we were able to provide them with insight into the medical billing process they will soon become familiar with. Using our tablets (Android and Apple) we were able to demonstrate the functionality of the Mo-Billing app and explain how it would be used in conjunction with our billing agent services. The residents we met were supportive and provided positive feedback for the use of a mobile app for on-the-spot patient claim data collection, storage and transmission to our billing agency. Though the residents weren't entirely familiar with the current and traditional medical billing process for out-of-clinic practice, they were observant of their attending's collection of patient claim data on cue cards and were able to appreciate the elimination of these cue cards through the use of our Mo-Billing app. While connecting with residents, whom are generally comprised of a younger generation, it was not surprising that they were appreciative of the use of mobile devices as they are more in touch with the use of technology. 

Below are pictures of Pil and I at the Family Medicine job fair at Montfort hospital.

After receiving positive feedback from residents we were excited for our second presentation of our product/service at the Family Medicine Forum (FMF) in Vancouver a week later, where we could gauge the interest of practicing physicians with experience with the current medical billing process. We were able to connect with various physicians practicing in Ontario, as well as other provinces. This was interesting as we were able to note the interest and value of our product and service in other provinces. Overall the feedback was positive and interest from potential customers was present. Similar to the job fair previously attended, we simply demonstrated the functionality of our Mo-Billing software and described our accompanying billing agent services to booth visitors. Practicing physicians were able to truly appreciate the "compelling value" of Mo-Billing.

Aside: For those of you reading that may not know, traditionally, the medical billing process for physicians is a three-step process consisting of patient claim data collection on paper, storage of the papers over a pre-determined period of time and transmission of the papers to the billing agent/agency for processing to the Ministry of Health. The current method of patient claim data transmission between the physician and billing gent/agency is limited to in person, fax, mail or scanning and emailing.

Back to the "compelling value" which, for customers using our Mo-Billing software and partnering billing agent services, is simply convenience. Customers are able to eliminate the use of paper, the hassle of storing and tracking sheets of paper containing confidential patient information as well as the inconvenience of transmitting patient claim data by fax, email, mail or in person. The collection, storage and transmission of patient claim data to our billing agency can be completed on-the-spot and in one step using our Mo-Billing software saving time for the physician.

It was nice to discuss these improvements to the medical billing process with physicians experienced in using the current process as they had a different level of appreciation for the use of our product. Below is a picture of Pil and I at  FMF.

By attending both the job fair and the conference we were able to make valuable connections and we are excited to see where those connections will lead. We also learned that a product and service like ours is of interest in other provinces. For now, we will be focusing on Ontario, where our web and mobile app are just recently available. The mobile app can be downloaded on Google Play and will be available on the iTunes store within two weeks. We will be sure to keep you updated on any future plans!

We are going live with our app!

Our app is ready for you to try! You can find our app on WWW and Google Play.

http://app.mo-billing.ca

Google Play page

We are waiting for Apple to review our app and will soon be available on iTunes for download for iPhones and IPads.

The app is very easy to use. You can provide us with the patient information either by taking a quick photo of a patient card or by typing in the name, DOB and OHIP number. Added features are searcheable hospital numbers and diagnosis/billing codes. The app is currently optimized for hospitalists who will find auto-generation of billing codes time saving. You enter the first date and the last date on which the patient was seen and the app will automatically generate all the billing codes in between.

The app is secured with 258 bit SSL. The data is kept on a secure server so there is no worry even if you lose your smartphone - confidential data will not be divulged!

We are looking forward to feedback!

By the way, we will be at the FMF in Vancouver on November 7-9, 2013. (Next week!) Drop by our booth, we'd love to see you!

Facebook page

We are on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/mobilling.fo8
Visit us and like us!

Mo-Billing App: Progress Report 1

You have now seen some screen shots of our in-house made prototype. The prototype was used for proof of concept, and yes, we did prove our concept would work!

Using the prototype software created by myself, Caleb Chan and Bradley Jung, a group of Carleton University Engineering students, we were able to successfully bill OHIP a significantly large test batch of claims. Pil was the so called "lab rat" in the experiment, as it was his batch of claims we tested the prototype on. I did all the behind the scene submission to OHIP. Since it was my first time submitting claims to OHIP, I really learned a lot on the subject of OHIP billing, mostly for hospitalist work. Pil taught me the basics and I learned a lot through research and continuous contact with the MOHLTC (I'm sure they found my phone calls annoying). I will be sharing this information with you in due time.

Now that we've proven our concept to work we are in the process of creating our marketable version. This will be created by Jevin Maltais, the founder of Quickjack Solutions, a company with expertise in building web and mobile apps. Together with Jevin, and based on our prototype work we have scoped out and planned our marketable version. Below is a teaser, showing part of the mock-ups that resulted after 2-weeks of intensive discussions/meetings and multiple iterations.

Logos, logos...

I just spent an hour at cooltext.com which is an awesome site where you can freely create logos of different pre-design and then tweak with what seems to be hundreds of cool fonts.

Here are few entries... some of them quite hilarious.

First, "I am a teenager and I am building a website." Burn baby, burn!

Oh yeah, tough billing!

This one I like, it's cute.

Bling Metallica? 

Real cute.Spelling mistake makes it look like "Mo-Bling"

Hmm...

Irish anyone?

Shrek gone Mo-Billing

Death metal Mo-Billing

The latest entry... ho hum...