📆 Appointments Page

The tools provided in our Appointments page will empower your practice to drastically decrease eligibility-related denials, increase up-front patient payments, and reduce the amount of time that front desk staff spend chasing down patient responsibility.

This page is the command center for front desk staff interacting with patients. From this interface you can:

Every night, the Athelas Appointment Importer will automatically pull in a list of your practice’s upcoming appointments and load them into your Appointments tab. Then, our systems analyze all detected insurance to confirm that your patients do in fact have eligible coverage.

The results are visible on each row of the appointments tab as a high-level

The results also show any patient responsibility and outstanding balances.

You will notice a colorful toolbar at the top of the page, with buttons for adding a ‘Walk-in Patient,’ running a ‘Live Eligibility Check’ and so forth. The available guides for each of these features are linked below.

By default, your appointments will be filtered to display the current date and hour.

You can, of course, close this filter or apply others (patient, provider, facility, other dates and times, etc.) to see any appointments matching your preferences.

If you click on an appointment, away from the patient’s name, you will see all information pertaining to this appointment. From here, you can view their eligibility status and rerun eligibility, view their raw benefits, proceed to collect a payment, and see details about all of these items.

If you click near the patient’s name, their patient profile will appear. Here, you will find information about their dates of service, charges, credits, etc.

Patients may have ‘Active’ or ‘Inactive’ eligibility. A patient’s eligibility may also return as ‘Inconclusive,’ in which case it may be worth double checking that their information matches that in your practice’s EHR.

The ‘Rules Applied’ field shows which raw benefits apply to this patient.

If there are any ‘Appointment Rules’ set, for example if a particular Service Type Code should apply for this appointment, they show up in the corresponding field.

The ‘Eligibility Rules Applied’ field shows details about how Athelas prioritizes elements of a patient’s eligibility.

From the Eligibility Status section, click ‘See More Details’ for further information, as shown in the example below.

This page will display information about the patient’s ‘Active Coverage,’ ‘Co-Insurance,’ and ‘Deductible.’ You can also specify the kind of information shown by choosing a category in the ‘Service Type’ dropdown menu on the right hand side.

Below the Eligibility Status section, you will see that patient’s ‘Check-in Status.’ If, for example, your practice has an onboarding workflow set up with Athelas and the patient has submitted any attendant forms, you see the status of their submissions here.

You can also see an example appointment reminder text, with a button to ‘Resend Text’ below.

A green dot next to a charge indicates that the charge has been collected. Click on the small receipt icon to view the transaction report of a collected charge.

Red text indicates an amount that wasn’t paid at time of service, and underlined red text indicates a large outstanding balance of high priority.

Click the charge to see the patient’s statement.

From here, you can print or send the statement to the patient to encourage full or partial payment of their bill.

If the front desk can collect all or part of an outstanding charge from a patient, click ‘Charge.’

There are numerous options for payment collection.

Click ‘Charge’ on an outstanding balance.

Select which outstanding balance(s) you would like to collect (or skip. We’ll get to that in the next section). If you would like to see where certain charges came from, click ‘View Details.’

If you’re collecting all or part of the outstanding balance today with no intention to set up a payment plan, you can manually adjust the numbers in the ‘Paying Today’ column.

In the example above, the patient would like to only pay $100 of the balance from 05/24/24, and the full balance from 04/05/24.

You will notice the Total Balance to be paid today, in the top left corner, adjust accordingly.

Click ‘Confirm & Continue.’

Make sure all payment setup items are correct, then click ‘Confirm.’

Check the box to ‘Set Up Payment Plan Today’ and click ‘Confirm & Continue.’

Fill out the form per the patient’s specifications—frequency, start date, etc. You can also click the toggle at the bottom to ‘Pause Communications,’ so that superfluous reminder texts and emails aren’t sent to the patient.

Select the patient’s payment method, double check all the settings (perhaps you won’t want to send a welcome message, for example, so uncheck that box), and then click ‘Confirm.’

Once you’ve collected payment you can either download the receipt or send it directly to the patient via email and text message. Once that’s complete, you’re all set!

If you need to skip a payment, click ‘Skip Payment’ from this modal.

A reason for the skipped payment is required, so fill it out accordingly and click ‘Proceed.’

That’s the rundown on the core features of the Athelas Appointments page. With these skills mastered you have everything you need to smoothly check insurance and collect payment from patients as they come into the office.

📢 Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Athelas representative should you need further assistance. We’re here to help!