Visual Practice XP Edition

OPSEU (Ontario Public Service Employees Union) goes on Strike.

Posted May 7th, 2002

While OPSEU has settled its labour dispute with the Government of Ontario as of May 6th, ACSL has learned that EDT and diskette submission and reconciliation processing may continued to be delayed up to 2 weeks, as the MOH systems are brought back online and put into full production again. This report is unofficial, but comes from staff within the payment processing group.

As we find out more information, we will post it here.

OPSEU (Ontario Public Service Employees Union) goes on Strike.

Posted March 13th, 2002

The Ontario Public Service Employee's Union has gone on strike as of midnight on March 12, 2002. This strike has implications for services that Visual Practice connects to such as EDT, HCV, as well as Submission and Reconciliation Services.

Many customers are calling our help line to ask us what to do. Some customers are under the impression that we are a part of the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care. ACSL owns Visual Practice and is a private company, and not part of OPSEU. Our staff are in their offices and in the field, doing their work and carrying on normal business activities.

However, Visual Practice relies on the Ministry of Health Services for submission and payment of health services, as well as health card validation. Prior to leaving their posts, Ministry of Health staff who are in charge of the Ministry of Health part of the system, shut down these services.

Customers using EDT or HCV will experience either Connection Refused errors or HCV Timeout errors because the Ministry of Health systems are not responding to requests. We regret the inconvenience this causes, but ACSL and Visual Practice are powerless to change the situation. For more information about the labour dispute and a detailed explanation of how you will be affected as a doctor or facility that is funded by the Ministry of Health (through fee for service or on contract), please refer to their recently posted bulletin on the matter.

We recommend that you continue to bill for services as part of your normal daily routine, but refrain from performing submissions or attempting to fetch reconciliations until further information from the Ministry of Health indicates that these services are back up and running. The bulletin also states that disk submission service has been interrupted, and not to send in disk submissions. Once the Ministry of Health services are restored, you will be able to submit your billings.

Please refrain from contacting our helpdesk regarding this matter, and rather, read the bulletin, and watch your local news for developments about the strike. We have no further useful information that we can provide beyond what has already been published. Our call-in volume has exploded since the strike, and it is making it very difficult for customers to call in with technical problems that we can help with.