Medical Billing - Report Generator 101

In our last installment of medical billing, we talked about the importance of being able to generate reports. In this article, we're going to give you a basic introductory course in using most DME report generator programs. There are some things that are basic to each even if the interface is a little different between them.

One of the keys of the DME report generator is the link fields. In order to understand how these work, you first need to understand how the architecture of the DME system is put together.

Each part of the DME medical billing system is made up of databases. There are databases for every piece of information in the system itself, including patient records, inventory records, doctors files, facility records and so on. Each record has a number of fields in the record itself.

The function of the report generator is to be able to pull up any field from any of those records in order to show it as a data item on a report. The question is, how is this accomplished? How does the report generator know how to find not just the database, but the specific record in the database and the specific file within the record?

This is done by indexing. Each database has a main index number in the system. For example, the patient database may be called db(001). The 001 in the parenthesis is the database number in the system. The inventory database may be db(002), the doctor database db(003) and so on.

Now, within each database, there will be a number of records. Let's say the patient database has 100 records. So if you wanted to reference the 65th record of the patient database, you might have a shorthand like db(001,00065), if they allow up to 99,999 patient records.

Continuing this, let's say each patient record has 100 fields in that record and you wanted to access the patient first name, which is the second record. Usually the first record is the patient ID number. In this case you would want to reference db(001,00065,002).

Obviously, a user of the system isn't going to be able to recognize what db(001,00065,002) means. It will be totally Greek to them. So what the report generator does is translate each of those numbers into plain English.

So, if the user wants to find patient record 65 and the second field within that record in order to have the patient's first name print on the report, in the case of printing patient labels, what the software will do is the following.

The first step is to display the available databases the user can choose from in some type of drop down menu. These will usually be listed in numerical database order and not alphabetical order. The next step, after the user chooses the database, is to choose which field they want printed. Again, a list of fields will be displayed in English and the user will choose which field he or she wants.

As to finding a specific patient, there are several ways to do this. Most report generators will allow a print all patients option along with a lookup function to do a database search by field number, such as patient ID or last name.

This is all very basic to how a report generator works for medical billing. In future installments, we'll dive deeper into the report generator functions.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Medical Billing