Medical Billing Software Alternatives?

irwinr12 asks: "Well, I've spent hours and hours and hours scouring though pages of google search results, trying to find a medical billing software package that will run on Linux. (Or Solaris or even Mac OS X for that matter) I've come out pretty much empty handed. Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right places, or perhaps such software does not exist yet? I ask this, because we are currently using MediSoft on Windows 98. We are very displeased with the service from medisoft, and the instability of Windows(MediSoft is partly to blame too) is costing us alot of money in downtime. We are a fairly small billing office, only billing for 5 doctors at this time, so some of the large 'hospital' billing systems want much more than we can afford for such a small operation. If anyone could send any information my way, i'd appreciate it." We did a similar story on Ask Slashdot over 3 years ago with very little in the way of definitive answers. Has the intervening time made any difference in the answers?

Comments

Re:ripe opportunity for some OOP

[foobar104]

But note that a medical billing program "is a" billing program

No, it's much more. Medical coding and billing is a science in and of itself; they write textbooks on the subject. It's not practical to talk about adapting a general-purpose accounts receivable tool to use in health care.

It wouldn't take too much effort to throw a custom GUI and printing interface over a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend.

It's pretty clear that you don't know what you're talking about here. Just implementing an integrity checking scheme for the tens of thousands of medical codes would be a monumental effort. And that's just the very beginning.

I'm sorry that I don't have anything positive to say. I just didn't feel right about letting this kind of misinformation get out there unchallenged.

The Medical Manager

[Llama Keeper]

There is a company here that has a medical billing platform that runs on SCO Unux and they have successfully ported it to Linux. My company uses it exclusively for billing our clients (we are a billing office). The server has a windows client that is really just a glorified terminal emulator. I have used dumb terminals to connect to it as well. Its a very robust platform and their support is pretty good. The only problem is that it is, as most of these apps are, quite expensive.

The Physician's Computer Company

[maggard]

Disclaimer: I know one of the principals.

Check out The Physician's Computer Company . They've been around 18 years, run on Red Hat (they handle it all for you), specialize in smallish offices like yours, having met some of the staff socially they're folks I'd like to do business with.

Medical software generally

[Paul Bain]

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp You can find an enormous amount of open-source, medical software at the VISTA and Hard Hats site. Some of the software apparently pertains to billing (see "integrated billing," about half-way down the page), but I cannot attest as to its quality or applicability to your needs.

Nearly all of the VISTA software is written in the Mumps programming language, with which comparatively few programmers are familiar these days (that's my impression -- I could be wrong).