The Alberta Health Information Act (HIA) permits AHS to use individually identifiable data we collect for the purpose of payment of services. AHS uses this data to bill Workers Compensation Board – Alberta (WCB-Alberta), and other patient insurance plans for reimbursement of costs incurred treating patients not covered by the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP). Meanwhile, physicians working in publicly-funded facilities collect most of their payments from AHCIP; they can also be paid by WCB-Alberta, other insurance plans, or patients directly for their services. Connect Care enables physicians to use this data in a way that enables easy compliance with HIA.
Connect Care is the new AHS provincial Clinical Information System (CIS) being implemented across Alberta. The CIS is the foundation of Connect Care, which will directly impact everyone who provides patient care within AHS. Physicians working at AHS healthcare centres will use Connect Care to access schedules, patient clinical documentation and financial information such as insurance.
Connect Care is making it easy, safe and efficient for physicians to manage professional billing through a tool called Service Code Capture (SCC).
If you would like to use SCC and the secure file transfer protocol (sFTP) to billing software, please fill out this Service Code Capture Request Form.
SCC is a function within Connect Care that allows medical staff to go paperless as they document the information they need for billing. All prescribers have access to SCC but most physicians can choose to use it or continue with billing processes used before the transition to Connect Care. Prescribers can use SCC to enter Schedule of Medical Benefits (SOMB) service codes, modifiers, and other billing information as they complete their clinical documentation. This billing data is extracted alongside of other patient and physician registration information.
The result is collated patient demographics, date of service and insurance information into a single, easy-to-read My Billing/WCB Codes report. Using SCC, physicians no longer need to print patient health information, or carry paper records in order to complete billing processes, significantly reducing the potential for a privacy breach.
This will reduce time required for billing as the required information is entered while still in the patient records. Additionally, it reduces other administrative activity related to billing by reducing data entry and transporting of information for the purpose of billing.
AHS has already been contacted by several commercial billing software companies and some private billing services that use their own proprietary software to submit to Alberta Health. You can see the list of who we’ve connected with on the List of Billing Software Vendors.
If you want to review the technical specifications, or send specifications to your billing software vendor or private billing service so they can consider developing the ability to import data and a secure file transfer protocol (sFTP) through which AHS can push software client’s data.
If you would like to use SCC and the sFTP to billing software, please fill out this Service Code Capture Request Form.
Contact us at servicecodecapture@ahs.ca for more information, or if you have questions.
For accredited billing software vendors, SCC provides an opportunity to enable software to directly import billing-related data extracted from Connect Care. This allows billing vendors to maintain their current customer base, and potentially provide a competitive edge.
AHS is dedicated to ensuring patient privacy and support for physicians. If both physicians and billing vendors use the SCC workflow instead of paper, collaboratively, this allows for more secure transmission of personal information protected by the Health Information Act.
If physicians use SCC, and billing software vendors invest in secure File Transport Protocol, vendors will receive data from AHS each night, and physicians will have next day access to billing information.
Contact us at servicecodecapture@ahs.ca for more information.
