Using HospiceMD for Your EMR? You Can Still Use a Dedicated Billing Team

If your hospice runs on HospiceMD, you already know it as a capable EMR. What a lot of HospiceMD users don't realize is that they don't have to use HospiceMD for their billing too. Your charting and your billing can live in two different places — and for many agencies, splitting them off lowers the bill and puts the revenue cycle in more experienced hands.

Hospice Engine has been doing hospice billing since 2012 — roughly 14 years of nothing but hospice. We're not a general medical billing company that also takes hospice accounts. Hospice is all we do, and we work directly inside your HospiceMD environment so you don't have to change a thing about how your clinical team charts.

Here's exactly how it works, what we handle every month, and what it costs.

You Keep HospiceMD. We Just Run the Billing.

This is the part that surprises people: you do not switch EMRs, you do not export anything, and your clinicians keep working in HospiceMD exactly as they do today.

You set us up as a user inside your HospiceMD account. From there, our billing team logs into HospiceMD on your behalf to pull everything we need — new admissions, the patient census, and the visit records behind every claim. Your staff keeps documenting in the system they already know, and we work alongside them in the background.

With your HospiceMD contract, you'd typically just adjust it to cover the EMR software itself and drop the billing add-on. HospiceMD remains your EMR; Hospice Engine becomes your billing department.

What We Do Every Day and Every Month

Daily: New Patients and Notices of Election

We log into HospiceMD every day to check for new admissions and submit the required Notices of Election (NOE) to Medicare on time. Medicare requires the NOE within 5 calendar days of admission, and a late NOE means you eat the days between admission and filing. Checking daily — not weekly — is how we keep that from happening.

On Demand: Eligibility Checks Whenever You Need One

Throughout the month, our billing team is an email away. Get a new referral and want to know if they're billable before you admit? Send us the patient's information and we'll come back to you promptly with:

• Whether the patient is eligible and currently covered
• Which benefit period they're in
• Who their coverage is through
• Any warnings — if there's a billing conflict, an open episode elsewhere, or if you'll need an authorization

That heads-up before admission saves a lot of downstream headaches and denied claims.

Cash-Flow Visibility: Know What's Coming Before It Lands

This is one of the things that sets us apart from other billing services. Throughout the month, we send you updates on the dollars you'll be receiving from Medicare — so you can see what's coming before it hits your account. For a hospice planning payroll, that visibility is the difference between guessing and knowing.

Start of the Month: A Quick Census Check

At the beginning of each month, we email you to confirm anything that might not be reflected in HospiceMD yet. We're asking about:

• Any discharges that haven't been entered yet
• Special cases — continuous care or GIP (general inpatient) patients we need to account for
• Room and board patients

This is how we make sure your bills go out correctly the first time, instead of being corrected and resubmitted later.

The 1st of the Month: Billing Goes Out — Even on a Weekend

We submit your monthly claims promptly on the 1st of the month. If the 1st falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, your billing still goes out. When you need your billing submitted on time, it gets submitted on time.

Along with it, you get a summary of what was billed, so you know your revenue for the month on day one rather than wondering.

Built In: Claim Validation Against Your Visit Records

Before claims go out, we pull the visit records for all your patients in HospiceMD and validate every claim against them. If something looks off, you hear about it from us first. A common example: we'll flag when a patient is due for an RN visit to stay compliant with the every-14-day visit requirement, before a missed visit turns into a problem on a claim.

Getting Started Is Simple

Onboarding is light on your end. We send you an agency setup form that asks for some basic information from your PECOS file, and you give our team a HospiceMD login. That's most of it. Once Medicare access is in place, we're ready to bill for your new patients' Notices of Election and run your monthly cycle.

And you only start paying once you're actually billing. If your census is low or you're between revenue right now, you're not paying us to sit idle — our fee kicks in when you're billing and receiving revenue from Medicare.

Pricing That Usually Comes In Lower

Our pricing is straightforward and scales with your census. For most HospiceMD users, moving billing to us comes in below what you'd pay for billing through your EMR vendor:

• Minimum tier: $250/month — this covers you down to a single patient
• Around 5 patients: roughly $500/month

From there it scales with your census. The math for most agencies works out like this: your HospiceMD invoice drops to just the EMR software cost once billing comes off it, and our invoice comes in lower than the billing line you were paying before. You get a dedicated, hospice-only billing team and a lower combined cost.

Why HospiceMD Users Make the Switch

• 14 years of hospice billing — in business since 2012, and hospice is the only thing we do
• No EMR change — you keep HospiceMD; we work inside it
• Daily NOE submission — we log in every day so nothing files late
• On-demand eligibility — email us before you admit and get answers fast
• Cash-flow forecasting — know what Medicare is paying you before it arrives
• Claim validation — we check visits against claims and warn you about issues first
• Lower cost — most agencies pay less than they did billing through their EMR

You can read more about how we work with HospiceMD specifically on our HospiceMD billing services page, or see the full onboarding timeline for what the first few weeks look like.