PowerDiary considers Medicare to be a type of insurance and also provides for session packs to be created in order to track sessions, time or money against a collection of sessions. So it's got some pretty broad capabilities but that also comes with a series of limitations as a result. Therefore we recommend some specific steps to deal with the complexity of Medicare MHCP and similar care plans.
Context
- Please be sure you're familiar with the GP Mental Health Care Plan items and process.
- PowerDairy session packs and reminders which flow from sessions packs are described in their knowledgebase reasonably well.
Our Solution
So from the above, we know that we need to create packs with typically 6 sessions of the common MBS items but we also need to deal with enforcing annual limits and interchangeable service items that all consume the pack session count.
- We will make sure that your Service items for the MHCP items are setup cleanly and we need the naming of these items to follow our usual naming convention
- Create a handful of MHCP templates - we need to separate the General Registration from the Clinical Psych endorsement, separate price points for Clinical Psychologists and Senior Clinical Psychologists etc, tehn separate the MHCP scheme from the Covid scheme from the Autism scheme etc
- For each client referral we will generate one or two session packs for each referral depending on the annual year tracking and make sure the authorised sessions on these care packs enforce the annual limits.
Steps
Create the templates
From the Setup > Session Packs menu, every time we setup a clinician for you we will create a couple of MHCP templates like this:
We also recommend creating a separate session pack using custom pricing to manage bulk billing clients.
Referral Management
Every time a referral comes in we check the inactive session packs for the client and make sure the referral is valid before entering the new sessions.
If for instance the GP has referred for the second batch of 6 MHCP sessions then we will create a new instance for this client using the correct template and then name it with the year. That might mean that we have to create one for the remaining 4 (6+4) and then spill the remaining 2 sessions into a second session pack for the following year.
Session Billing Management
Every time we go to process a payment we check if there is an "Open session pack" and consume it if it is there. As the count drops to 0 sessions remaining we use the tasks list to send the notification of last session under MHCP email to the client.
Annual Management
At the end of each year we rebalance any unused sessions into the new year's session pack. For instance if they were referred for 10 eating disordered sessions but only used 7 we will close out the existing session pack for the previous year and create a new one (dated with the date of the referral), named to include the current year and only the 3 remaining sessions.
Invalid Referral Management
It is really common to get poor paperwork from GP's. In fact 31% of referrals we have found to be invalid. When this happens we create a session pack with a single session and then correspond with the GP to clean up their paperwork, use the single session (which is acceptable from the Department of Health's point of view so long as the referral is pretty close) and then we use the Task list to remind us to follow up with this GP 3 days later because around a quarter of GP's never respond to the request to fix their mistakes.
See this article for more details:
https://clinpsychcentre.com.au/medicare-paperwork-burden/
Last Updated 28 March 2022
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