Visual Practice HOW TO

...Check the status of a single card (HCV Now)

Checking a single health card's validity is very simple to do, and takes under 40 seconds. 

In order to perform HCV activities, the patient's assigned default billing provider must have a datapac account and an HCV account, and these account details must be set up in the billing provider's Provider Form entry.  The user logged into Visual Practice must also have HCV operator privileges.  The Ministry of Health expects providers to keep their HCV systems secure and accessible by only authorized staff.  Proper configuration and use of Visual Practice will enable you to meet these expectations.

When an authorized user is logged into Visual Practice, and a patient is listed on a form on the screen, the Validation Button   will appear on the toolbar.

Clicking on the Validate Button will cause a pop-down menu to appear as shown below:

You have several validation options available to you.  In this example, we will validate a single patient health card.  You can validation a particular patient's health card information by selecting that patient in the Patient Registry, Card Swipe form, OHIP billing form or Scheduling/Booking form.  This flexibility enables you to validate patient health card information in a variety of circumstances and conditions.  In this example, we are using the Patient Registry entry for a patient and selecting the "HCV Now" option from the menu.

For those who wish to validate cards presented at the point of service, swipe the patient's card using the Health Card Wizard (Swipe) feature.  Once the card is swiped and a patient is displayed on the screen, you can click on the validate button to check the card information.

Once the "HCV Now" option is selected, Visual Practice checks the default billing provider to determine if the provider has an HCV account.  Health care providers are only authorized by the Ministry of Health to validate their own patient's health card information.

If the default billing provider's HCV information is present and he/she is licensed for HCV in Visual Practice, the patient information will be passed to the HCV validation module for processing.  As Visual Practice proceeds to validate the information, the Health Card Validation progress window appears.  

If your modem volume is turned up, you will hear the modem connect to datapac.  Once there is a connection, the sound will disappear and there will be a pause in screen activity as Visual Practice logs into the Ministry of Health HCV service and proceeds to pass the provider and card information onto the validation service.  Once a reply is received, it is displayed on the Health Card Validation progress window, and in the background, the patient's validation information in the Patient Registry is updated.  This enables you to keep a record of the validation status for that patient and recall it at a later time, as shown below:

Elements of the IntelliCard Strategy

In this short tutorial, you have seen a part of the IntelliCard technology that Visual Practice uses to maintain the most possible up to date health card status for all patients in the Patient Registry.  As Visual Practice is used to bill OHIP, and OHIP responds to billings through Reconciliation Advice files, Visual Practice incorporates the validation results of billing into the Patient Registry as well.  Validation information can also be updated manually, when, for instance, a health care provider uses the Ministry of Health's IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system to determine card validation status.

In all cases of card validation, the status of the card ultimately resides in the Patient Registry under the Card tab.  The point of all this activity is to ensure that you have the most update to date information possible when seeing a patient for the first time, seeing them after a lengthy absence, or billing them  IntelliCard ensures you are able to minimize billing rejections by reducing the instances where you see a patient before knowing their health card information will not be honored for payment by OHIP.

HCV is the strongest element of the IntelliCard strategy.  The Ministry of Health is the best source of validation information and the HCV system has been designed to provide health care providers with fast (almost immediate), easy and accurate validation services.