Ask the Expert

Nuesoft Xpress™ is pleased to bring you this segment of
e-Nues, where our experts answer your questions about student health challenges that can be addressed through
a technology solution.

Steven Wooten, MBA, MS is the director of training, implementation and documentation at Nuesoft Technologies. View his response below to the question submitted by one of our readers.

Question:

We are a small college in Pennsylvania. Currently, students have to file their own claims with insurance carriers, but we’re coming under some pressure to start billing the one insurance carrier that provides our college’s health insurance policy ourselves. The only software we have at the moment is an
off-the-shelf electronic scheduler and we’re concerned that billing manually will drain too much of our already stretched human resources, but we’re not sure we can afford billing software on our budget either. What would you advise?
--Submitted by nurse director in Pa.

Answer:

Billing without automated software is definitely a time-intensive option that probably won’t be practical in the long term. I
would advise replacing your off-the-shelf scheduling package with all-in-one software that can schedule, bill, manage immunizations and pull data from your campus system. This will stop you having to enter data in more than one place and will automate a lot of your most time-consuming tasks. You
can then reallocate the dozens of hours saved each week to billing.

A software package like Nuesoft Xpress can handle all of
these functions, including electronic claim filing, and because it’s subscription based and requires no new hardware, it’s a much more affordable option. If you still don’t think you can afford automation, it may be time to take it a step further and make a business case to your school’s administration for investing in student health management software so that you can bill to all commercial insurance carriers. Third party billing is a growing trend in college health and apart from the obvious benefit for students, it also can be a welcome extra stream
of revenue for your campus health services.

If you have a question that you would like to submit to our experts, please e-mail it to editor@nuesoft.com.