HandyWorks Blog

Fixed: If you mark a patient as off the mailing list, they won't get a birthday letter. Fixed: Statements are all black - no colors Added: New carrier type - Federal. And this addition cascades into all the reports and billing options Added: Option to print a single fee slip from Transactions Screen. Coming: Withdraw code that supports Access 2007. Time to move up to a higher version of ACCESS>

The ability to reach out to a patient through a text message was just added to HandyWorks, thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Timothy W. We are able to do this with the help of clicksend.com, a large and well supported web business that provides the actual sending software. Messages cost 2.5 cents each if they are under 160 characters and there is a monthly fee of $1.68. Over the last 2 months, we have been refining the process to make it even easier to use. GIVE IT A TRY! To set this up, first use this link to create a handyworks linked account. After you have an account, get a TFN verified number. Download and run ClickSend to get clicksend.txt into your c:\hww folder Open file explorer to the HWW folder and DoubleClick the clicksend.txt file to edit it Put in your information replacing the sample data. That's it! The link from the patient data screen will now become active and usable.

When there were more than 4 columns being used in the calendar, the daily report would shift to a LANDSCAPE mode that included all 10 columns. The latest version 2/13/2024 keeps the portrait version for both 5 and 6 column reports.

For some unknown reason, we had only provided corrected claim info on resubmitted claims when billing electronically. That has now been fixed and the corrected claims info will now appear on printed HCFAs. Wellcare Medicare: One user is reporting to us that the onset/first treatment date codes are not being accepted by this carrier. This is something that has not been resolved as of this update. And, as usual - a few more quotes and some minor cosmetic changes here and there.

We found a few situations where users were able to create claimsets that failed to pass edits. We corrected these issues. A fix to the financial reports clears up some issues of not including certain inactive patients.

We have a few minor tweaks in this version. The inactive handling section that lets you delete inactive patients has been revised to permit deletions even when the patient is the referral source of a patient who will not be deleted. The SOAP and Exam reports are now black and white. The blue heading are no longer blue. The extra blank page from the missed appointment report is removed. The referential integrity check done at start-up has been streamlined.

The tab Month at a glance on the bottom of the calendar has been completely reworked to show the day-by-day visit counts for each room. Take a bird's eye view of your appointments.

Wow! 5 characters are not enough. So we expanded the field to 9 in Carriers. Use it if you need it. Otherwise, there is no difference for most of you. Also, we finally squashed a reporting bug that occurred when closing the program. It was happening when a record in case data was not saved. It was being automatically saved when the program closed, but a subsequent update function wouldn't work. All fixed now. No more error messages if colosing with an unsaved case data record.

A few items have changed for the better. In Attorneys, we added an email field. We tightened the SOAP and EXAM forms and modified how the signatures are handled. The Ledger Statement was fixed to print out bill dates. Credit Card handling for NFC cards was improved.

We added a new Monthly Stats report to break down how many distinct patient visits occurred each month. If a patient saw you 12 times, it would count as one patient visit. It will automatically run when you run the original Monthly Stats report. The dropdown next patient visit dates on the calendar has been specifically ordered by date. Prior, it was ordered by date of entry, which appeared to be by date but actually wasn't. Also, the next appointment sheet given to patients now has the day of the week as part of that report. Lastly, the SALT button in Exams was fixed to reflect the latest exam, not the earliest.

We know do intelligent rounding for tax rate calculations. Better referential integrity repairs Improved stored credit card handling As usual - a few more good quotes!

Only a few items are in this update... Added a way to delete a clinic and its patients. Minor code cleanup More good quotes for Handyworks.

A fix for the deleted appointment report and a fix for an annoying exit bug round out a number of small changes, all making HandyWorks more stable.

Our recent addition of tracking who adds and deletes appointments has been extended into the multiple appointment wizard. An annoying bug that was "clicking OK" when entering lines in the transaction screens was fixed. It was only happening when the Day Stats screen was open. The culprit was hidden in our behind the scenes update of Day Stats. aLL GOOD NOW!

The report of added appointments that is available from the End of Day / Day Stats report has an added column for identifying the User that made the addition. Also, a new report on DELETED appointments prints at the same time.

No database is perfect, and small errors can creep in without notice. That's why the Checking Data Files routine has 9 steps, looking for and correcting as it goes. The last step of checking the raw data looks for a rare problem where data gets duplicated into an extra column. We added a special report as well so we can see exactly which patients have a problem. And, as we have been doing for years, there's a few more tasty quotes for your handyworking enjoyment.

A few refinements start 2020 for us. A better organized add-in menu tops the list. We put things in a better order and added reAttach data as an option so you can bypass Preferences if desired. We also added support for the new change in those cases where the Referring Provider now has to indicated as the Ordering Provider. Another nifty feature helps clean up multiple 1/1/1980 Balance Corrections. All for your pleasure.

Many of our users have both separate clinics and separate businesses. We added specific support and coding for this since everything shares the same folder. Also, towards the end of each year, we upload and post a final upgrade. There are no major changes here, just some fine-tunings, a few more quotes, and lots of love. Enjoy!

The new receipt lists all future appointments instead of just the next. **We like to offer our users multiple options when it comes to accepting credit card payments. This summer, we integrated PNC Bank (merchant services) into the HandyWorks network of suppliers. PNC offers competitive rates and a dedicated support team. Check them out! Please contact Sean McDonald, (the VP of Integrated Payments) via phone (914) 222-3762 or email sean.mcdonald@pnc.com .

Say goodbye to the old drop down macros. Now everything is accessible at once. 5/29/2019 - fixed a problem with accessing the pop-up notes from the new add-in menu. And more "quotes"!

For the longest time, NY required it's unique form (the C4) for claims submission (by mail only). As of 2019, they are now permitting the standard HCFA 1500 to be used, along with a Narrative component. We have done the necessary crosswalk from the C4 to the 1500, and enlarged the Accident Description area for your Narrative. Only use the Accident Description if you are planning to send the claim electronically, and the information will be automatically added to the electronic claim.

Stuff about Statements We recently corrected and issue with the printing of the first date on a statement. This worked quite well on "normal" statements, but payment only statements did not print any dates because the payment was not usually the first item in a visit. That's Been Fixed. At the same time we were testing the payment only Statement, we noticed that when we did a payments only Statement, that the end of day report was stuck on the payments only as well. That's Been Fixed. Then when testing finance charges, we found another problem of it not printing the number in the correct column. That's Been Fixed. A long time user needed 99 (other) for the place of service. That's Been Fixed. Cheers!

Going out on a first date? One really nagging issue has been the printing of the first transaction dates on statements. Because we only want to show the first date in a transaction that has many services, we had code that would hide the subsequent dates. But, when the statement was viewed and then printed, the routine would "mess up" and hide all the dates on the first visit. Well that is now Fixed. A fix for the ERA Some clearinghouses have begun making the ERA (Electronic Remittance Advice) "readable" by breaking up the lines. This actually made them harder to read by "machine". FTFY. Time will Tell! A second improvement is on the appointment book. The time now displays on the top line.

The Exam form allows the user to implement a care plan. What was missing from that plan was the ability to indicate extremity treatments. This is now fixed. We also made the loading of the appointment calendar prettier (so it doesn't display the background screen refreshes when it resizes).

Over the course of time, users have entered hundreds of carriers, many of which differ only by a slight difference in a physical mailing address. For the most part, if one is doing electronic claims, all of these carriers have the same payer ID and that having multiple carriers is simply unneeded. In older versions of HW, we provided a utility to transform one carrier to another, but this is slow and tedious when there might be a dozen or so more to transform. So we enhanced the conversion process by providing a change from list box that lets you select more than one carrier at a time to transform. Simply select with your mouse which carriers need to be transformed and then select what to transform into. Green to go, as usual. Confirmation for each change is still required. In the same vein, we have added a similar feature to procedure codes. This lets you get rid of old codes by transforming them, in bulk into newer codes.

Can you hear me now? Sometimes the network data connections gets lost. And sometimes the database has something "bad" happen to it. It's very beneficial to detect these problems every time you start Handyworks. So no major changes here, just better code in the background.

Over the years, many users have asked if we could resize the screen and make it bigger. We always replied that we couldn't do this and that the only way to do this was through the computers resolution setting. But now, we are adding the ability to RESIZE your HW screens. We have currently done this for the Appointment Book, but if you think other forms need resizing, just let us know.

Over the last few months, we have experienced ceaseless robo-fax calls from many different places to our 800 line, resulting in 100's of hang-up fax calls on a near daily basis. Not only was this annoying in and of itself, but having to delete countless screeching messages became a time-consuming and useless chore. Adding to the misery was the racking up of bogus phone charges. "Enough" we said! So the 800# is no more. Please use our direct line 212-889-8878 for all future support calls.

A minor fix on electronic billing where a new onset date was being picked when re-sending an an older visit. (Thanks Teresa) We also fixed a problem with statements where adjustments were showing up as credits when sometimes they were not. We also made the amount adjusted field larger to hold bigger numbers.

Tracking supplies can be difficult, especially if you carry a lot of nutritional products. To help solve the problem, we've added two fields to our procedure codes to handle inventory count and reorder warning levels. We've tied this into transactions so when a patient gets a particular item, the inventory count gets reduced. We don't have reports fleshed out yet, but that is in progress.

This is from our archives. I think 1985. Our first DOS version. It all fit on a 1.2 meg floppy disk. We originally developed this on a Kaypro machine that had a 10meg hard drive. The first installation was in Atlnata, at the office of Dr. Gene Sparlin, closely followed by our.second installation in the office of Dr. Dan Sullivan. From there, we jumped to NY in 1984 where HandyWorks was rewritten from the ground up. Mailing out disks and updates was quite a chore back then, prior to the internet. Our first website, captured by the wayback machine is here .

HandyWorks will check this website to see if a later version is available. And if so, you'll get a gentle nag! Procedure codes marked as Favorite are now preferentially sorted in transactions. Patient age calculation is improved in narratives. Diagnosis in Letter now works properly.

For some reason, msaccess does not allow a form printscreen to work in an expected manner. So we added a simple way to make that happen. In addition, we changed the behavior of the find box in patient data to NOT go into the last name field. Some users were not seeing that the field was highlighted and were typing over the last name. Finally, a new Place of Service (residential treatment facility) on the Transaction Screen

Refactoring code lets things run faster and smoother. And that's what this update is about, plus a few more good quotes to entertain. So there are no "real" changes here, except a few minor touch-ups in places where, behind the scenes, the code was inelegant.

For the last 17 years, Medicare insisted that all dates on a HCFA be PRINTED with 4 digit years. (Electronic claims are not affected.) But according to one of our users in Ohio, now they want ALL DATES to have 2 digit years . While this can be changed in the HCFA preferences setting, it will not (currently) affect birth dates. Our October update will fix that, specifically and only for Medicare. If you are having a problem with dates in printed HCFA Medicare forms, we can fix that for you individually.

Prior to this September update, if you had special margin settings for your reports, you would have to manually change them. From this point forward, HandyWorks will save these settings in a file on each machine. When a new upgrade is detected, HW will read those settings and restore your margin settings to what they used to be. While we have streamlined the process of printer selection for ChargeItPro and X-Charge, these still have to be changed them manually. Please note that this upgrade will not work if you are (heaven forbid!) running MS Access 2000!

In the August 18th, 2017 update to Office 365, Microsoft broke your scrollbar. Not even an apology. There are two options. Revert to an earlier version by following these steps or Wait for Microsoft to fix it with the next upgrade (whenever that might be).

In the Main Switchboard, Click Add-Ins, Utilities and Repair HWDATA. You can try to repair the data when the calendar is running slowly. When Handyworks won't open and you keep getting the message: "Point me to the location of your data", it likely means that your hwdata is corrupt. In the past, you would have to exit the program and manually try to repair the data. BUT NO MORE! Now, when you get the "Point to me" message more than once, HandyWorks will ask if you want to try to repair the data. If you say "OK", repair will be attempted, and if successful, you will get another attempt to connect to your data. If the repair fails, you will be prompted to call tech support. And always, for your own sake, have recent backups. For as we all know, "stuff" happens.

Finalized the interface in the duplicate patient merge module. No longer is it possible to do it wrong! - Thanks Eve The "Authorized Through" report was asking for unneeded financial parameters (fixed) - Thanks Stu. The automatic quit after 3 hours of inactivity was hanging on some machines (fixed!) The zip code box in carriers was made a "tad" wider. (it was too small for zip+4) The Upgrade link was fixed. And a redirect was set for the old website to handle older upgrades as well. Printing or viewing the appointment calendar also creates a CSV file "MyAppointments.csv". This is for those of you brave enough to use an external reminder service.

Over the years, we have seen how offices have created multiple patient accounts when in actuality, the offices should have created multiple cases (for that one patient) since it was the same person each time. We have created a new module that solves this problem. It is accessed from the patient data screen by clicking on the tool icon on the top left. Just follow the instructions on the screen. We fixed the graphing issue in the new statistics module so it presents a better bell curve. We added some code to electronic billing that allows the ansi ebill creation to follow the HCFA preferences rule for filling box 32A. There is only one user with this situation, and only for Medicare claims, but it makes sense to make the rules you choose to apply in more places.

This is a very interesting addition. It includes 3 reports, allows you to control the ranges that you want to consider, and choose between active, inactive or both. It's found on the bottom right of patient data. ENJOY! As of 5/12, the report graph has been enhanced and an error handler has been added to one of the calculations.

I've often wondered what my average patient visit count was. Standard deviation as well. We had something that did this in the original HW-DOS system from the early 80's but nothing in the ms access version. Sad. Well, it coming soon to an update near you. What an amazingly high standard deviation I have on my visit counts. That's because I have a hundreds of 1 or 2 visit wonders along with hundreds of patients with over a 100 visits. So it's not really a useful number for me. Maybe it will be different for you. What is the average age of my patients? And Female/Male ratio as well. The basic form is in place. The graphing is still under construction and may only available as a report rather than on screen.. Stay tuned...

We fixed an error in calculating the "contractual obligation" aka "write off" that occurred in certain "edge" cases with some insurance payments. This happens when there were multiple write-offs without any corresponding payments. This is a rare problem, as we had been using the ERA payment module for over a year and had only encountered the problem for the first time a week ago.

When patients haven't been in for a really long time, it makes little sense to keep them in the system. While each state has different retention lengths, in NY, we must keep records for 7 years. So, at the beginning of each new year, we delete all of our patients that we are not legally required to retain. We do this from the Patient Data screen, in the inactive handling section as shown in the image shown above. Once your dates are set, just press the DEL button. As usual, it's a good idea to have a current backup prior to this process.

I've added a number of famous movie quotes for your HandyWorking pleasure.

Many years ago, we revised the unpaid bills report to breakdown bills by how old they were. So bills older than 3 months old were printed in a different section than bills 1 and 2 months old. Recently, a user asked us to give them a way to use the old report, so that bills for any one patient could be grouped together. The screen above shows how we added an option for either report.

The screen size for the "3" screen is supposed to become larger for certain combinations of Windows and MS Access. One of the combinations was not handled properly. This has been fixed and is in the 2/17/2017 update .

A user asked, "How do I get a list of patients that owe us money, from largest to smallest?" From the report wizard, click on financial and then click "Green to Go". If you want to limit the list to patients that owe you "old" money, then go to the balance options tab and make over 120 balance "more than zero" and the other balance options all zero. This will give you a list of those patients who have only very old charges.

A few gentle fixes are included in the 2/13/2017 update . First is a fix in electronic bills, when there are multiple locations and a master billing clinic, the NPI number for the service location is left blank. The NPI for the billing provider and rendering provider are included. Secondly, the calculation of visit counts for Day Stats, when there were multiple clinics, was not totaling correctly. Lastly, there is new code in the Main Switchboard that will pick up if you are not running the proper version of HandyWorks for your program or for your HWDATA.

Everything needs a little freshening, and websites are the same. This is our "New and Improved" HW website, powered by WordPress. Our Legacy site, was all html code, and maintained in a cumbersome way using FrontPage and an FTP uploader. Our intent is to document user issues on a day to day basis.

In creating the ANSI file, the service location needs to be sent without the NPI. And the rendering provider should only be in the service line loop, not the patient loop.

Everything needs a little freshening, and websites are the same. Welcome to the New and Improved HW website!

Minor adjustment of HCFA assignment box More statusline quotes Database name on status line at startup Screen transition speedups Definitive 2016 year end final version

Fixed contact phone number issue with MD-Online Minor format changes in Exams and Exam reports Date display fix on transaction screen (thanks Lana) Address and first line fix for "real" referral thank you letters. (Thanks Gonzzo) Increased size of DayStats screen. Increased size of Documents screen.

Document Handling. Link from Patient and Case Data (Thanks Stu) Added fee class option to procedure code analysis (Thanks Rick) Diagnosis field sizes widened to show full ICD10s Diagnosis Pointer "K" fixed (Was printing "I") (Thanks Michael) Diagnosis Code 11 on HCFA fixed SOAP Exam report Gait option prints nothing if not set (Thanks Cheryl)

End of Day reports print even if only non-billable services appear (Thanks Lana) End of Day report shows the count of non-billable services Statements have option to surpress the aging balances box ChargeItPro fix for ContactLess cards

Fixed a rare insurance write-off error when editing an older record. Some minor formatting fixes on statements (Thanks Stu) NY Comp form updated to allow ICD10 (Thanks Mike) Added supervising option for referral sources. This puts a DQ modifier in 17A instead of DN (Thanks Diana) Beefed up use of favorites in terms of lists and reports

Favorites tag for Attorneys, Cariers Diagnosis codes and Procedures.

Chirowrite Dx (ICD10) Codes added to output files A fast way to get rid of unused entries in Carriers, Attorneys, Referrals and Procedure Codes

More space for longer ICD10 codes on statements General efficiency and performance enhancements Added option to put a period in the ICD10 HCFA print options

ICD10 added to NY Comp C4 forms (11/12) Corrected the cause for an Access error message if HandyWorks was closed down without using the STOP button Fixed HCFA Error when a diagnosis code was too long. (11/10) Changed the margins on the monthly stats report (11/9) Added credit card REFUNDS to the ChargeItPro credit card system (11/6)