At Health Financial Systems, we take your cost reporting and data seriously. In addition to assisting your cost report filing through accurate calculations and reports, we want to assist you with storing your data for future access and data analysis. This additional support includes a pre-acceptance analysis to give you confidence in your electronic cost report submission to the MAC.
For now, you will need to file your report with your MAC manually. However, we are testing an automated electronic filing process that will not only store your file for safe keeping, but file the report with your MAC for you.
We are calling this service SaFE, for Store and File Electronically.
With SaFE, you will get the following services:
Validity Pre-Scan –
We will run your file through an automated version of an acceptance review. Our web database will import your electronic submission and give you a report. This process validates the encryption code on both the EC and PI files. Next we check the data in the EC file for validity. The EC file is converted to an HFS file and calculated. All CMS edits and the settlement calculation is checked and compared. Finally all data in the EC file are compared with the values created in the HFS data file. We cannot guarantee that this check will catch everything but it’s a great review. At this point, the pre-scan is in no way associated with the MAC’s Acceptability process and has no way of checking signatures or data filed outside of the cost report.
Cost Report Storage –
We will keep your data and store it under your account. You will have access to your data. We hope to expand our template feature to look at your web account for prior year data to start your next year’s cost report. For now, consider this a great back up location of your data.
Your file will not be shared with anyone outside of HFS. Your cost report will only become public data when the MAC submits your data to the CMS HCRIS database and CMS releases that data to the public. We are testing this process to see if it would be useful to MACs. At this point we will not send your data to the MACs. If we are successful in automating this process and the MACs are interested in the pre-scan automation, we will notify you and ask permission to share your data with your MAC.
Future Features
Comparison to Prior Year HCRIS Data –
We have a web based HCRIS database. We have created several helpful reports that give information about your facility. When your report is submitted electronically to us, we will e-mail you back informational reports comparing this year’s cost report data to the 3 most recent cost reports in the HCRIS database. PPS facilities will receive a Dashboard Report, Balance Sheet, and Wage Index report. CAH facilities will receive a Dashboard Report and Balance Sheet. Other facilities will receive a Balance Sheet Report. These reports are free. If you are interested in seeing more reports about your facility or other facilities we do sell subscriptions to our HCRIS database.
Retrieval of Prior Year Data for use in CY cost report preparation –
We plan to enhance our template feature to populate data from reports you have stored in SaFE.