Technology is POWERFUL . . . with the assumption that it is used correctly, otherwise, technology may end up creating more work. One of the keys to staying a high NET practice is to watch your lab bills closely. Unfortunately, labs are not perfect and they do make mistakes, we just need to make sure the mistake does not cost us. When we receive a lab bill we will take the individual bills and reconcile them with the end of month statement. In the past my predecessor has walked through each bill and matched it to each statement. One problem, the Essilor statements are not in alphabetical order making searching through them very difficult. Another problem, the .pdf that are available through Essilor are not true .pdf as they have renderable text…Ouch. Many of my readers probably don’t understand renderable text, it is text that is unrecognizable by OCR software such as Adobe. That is a very broad definition, the big picture, it is difficult to OCR (optical character recognition) the .pdf to make it SEARCHABLE. When a document (.pdf) is searchable then your staff can find Mrs. Smith with software like Adobe Acrobat in seconds. Once the document was searchable and broken into characters (OCR) I could then put it in an Excel spreadsheet and alphabetize the last 3 months. The advantage of this is finding those patients listed multiple times to identify charges that are incorrect or we were billed twice. Below you will see the method to my madness.
We quarterly save hundreds to thousands of dollars in finding bills that have been processed or billed incorrectly.
How to Alphabetize Essilor Statements
- log into https://www.isecurus.com/Essilor/RLogin.cfm
- search for the range of statements
- “View all” statements
- Save statement to .pdf on desktop
- open .pdf in Adobe 9 Pro
- “save as” .tiff
- create a .pdf from “multiple files” in Adobe 9 Pro
- select all of the “.tiff” files that were created in step 6
- a new .pdf is created
- “save” to desktop
- in Adobe 9 Pro open the new .pdf and delete all pages that don’t have patient’s info on them
- OCR the document
- highlight page by page the information that includes the patient name
- “right click” and “copy as table”
- paste into Excel spreadsheet
- repeat 13-15 for each page
- then in Excel spreadsheet go to DATA at the top and choose “Sort”
- select the column letter with the patient’s last name
- click to sort
- save document
