FOSS Billing Project Announced

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FOSS Billing Project Announced

Posted by I. Valdes on Sunday April 06, @02:58AM
from the Billing dept.
Fred Trotter has a pretty major announcement of a Free and Open Source medical billing project for FreeMED that will work with other projects: 'It is time to announce a new project of the FreeMED Software Foundation. The FreeMED Billing Project. It has become clear that this Project should be a meta project. There are several FOSS Practice Management systems, but no one has a really good implementation of a Billing System. Like FreeMED the other projects seem to be implementing billing in a piecemeal fashion, supporting whatever their particular users request. This is not the fault of the Projects. Billing is arbitrarily complex due to the whim of the insurance companies. A system is needed that can quickly adapt to that system...' The rest of the announcement is within.

The FreeMED Billing Project will be implemented in Perl. To gain access to the text munging, XML capabilities and expect module that Perl offers. It will use an XML-RPC interface to connect into FreeMED.

This XML-RPC interface will be FreeMED neutral, which means other. GPL FOSS systems will be able to make us of it. So far at least TORCH and OSCAR have expressed hopes that the system will be designed and implemented well enough that they might be able to integrate it. Hopefully this project will eventually play a similar role as OpenSSH does in the Operating System community. Helping lots of different projects, by addressing a common need.

Which is a good point to open up the RFP portion of this section. Here are my current implementation ideas.
1. I will implement a little language, in XML.
2. The interpreter will be written in Perl
3. The will be a script that converts medical manager billing formats (also a little language)
4. The system will be capable of targeting printers for paper forms
5. The system will be capable of using a modem for Electronic Billing interfaces.
6. Exactly WHAT gets billed will be up to the Practice Management System. FreeMED Billing will simply bill what it is told to bill, and query the PM for the info it needs to make that happen.
7. We intend to bill National Similar Format (HIPPA version) electronic billing and HCFAish paper billing, as well as patient statements and superbills in version 1.0 Any other great needs???

I will do the first round of feature requests and implementation suggestions here. After that is finished I will move further discussion over to a list or Wiki at FreeMED.org. I will of course post periodic updates back here....

Fred Trotter, CISSP
FreeMED.org

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