If your practice uses Online Claiming, and one or more of your practitioners has elected to use Patient Claiming (the patient's claim is initiated online via your surgery, saving the patient a visit to the Medicare office) when issuing a private account, you can elect to either;

o      Transmit the claim immediately, or

o      Store the claim for transmitting later in a batch of such claims.

Key Points

o      Stored Claims can only be sent from a computer that has an internet connection.

o      Claims must be sent within one day of their creation. This is a condition of the Medicare Australia agreement signed by the Practitioner. Any delays will result in the Patient being paid later by Medicare Australia. You will be notified if there are stored claims to be sent when you open or close Pracsoft.

o      Stored Claims that have not yet been sent to Medicare Australia can be deleted. You may wish to do this if you discover an issue with a claim. In such situations the patient/claimant must be notified.

To send stored patient claims:

1.      Select Processing > Online Patient Claiming > Send Store and Forward Claims. The Send Store and Forward Claims window appears.

2.      Select the claims to be sent. By default, all claims are selected. To delete any claim(s) select the claim by checking the box on the line next to the claim and then select  Ensure you do not delete them all by accident!

3.      Click to transmit the claims to Medicare Australia. A response will be returned indicating the success/failure of the transmission and the number of claims transmitted.