The Immense Impact of Assignment of Benefit on your Practice

You’ve likely heard about the upcoming legislative changes related to Assignment of Benefits (AoB), but many of you may not be fully aware of how these changes will significantly impact your practice. This has major workflow ramifications and may impact your cashflow so we recommend you start thinking about how the AoB changes will be managed in your clinic.

Here are the impacts in a nutshell:

1. 1. From 1 July providers must retain evidence that their patients have assigned their Medicare benefit to the provider for 2 years. This is a substantial change to the legislative requirement as it exists currently.
   2. A valid AoB must be in place before bulk-billed claims are submitted to Medicare.
   3. If Medicare rejects a claim and an MBS item number needs to be changed (for example, changing a care plan to a consultation), you will be required to seek a new Assignment of Benefit to ensure the patient’s agreement matches the revised service details.
   4. If you use Tyro for Medicare Bulk Bill Easyclaim, you are already capturing evidence of the assignment through your terminal. While this workflow services are immediately paid, therefore this option may not cater for clinics who complete an end of day reconciliation process before batching services to Medicare.
   5. Enduring Assignment of benefit will be a 2027 feature of AoB, but right now, you need to get a new assignment of benefit per episode of care, or consultation.

There’s a lot to consider…

You can continue using your trusted third-party provider, like your online booking system. However, AoB SMS to patients may be delayed, and these services cannot be used for exception management.  The next release of Oxford, in conjunction with Bp Comms, will cater exclusively for this workflow so if you’re looking for seamless batching, instant delivery of AoB SMS, exception management and more, Bp Comms is worth considering. Best Practice is even introducing new Bp Comms packs to cater for the increase in SMS, which will be charged at a rate of 4c.

You also need to be aware that pre-assignment is a factor to consider. During the pre-assignment process, the patient requests the type of service and where that service is completed.  If you render a different service during the consultation, you actually need to recapture the assignment of benefits.

You also must register your Practice with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to ensure your digital AoB SMS doesn’t get it flagged as spam when it arrives on your patients’ phone.

What can I do to prepare now?

• • Decide now how you’re going to implement this in your practice
  • Review your policies and processes, e.g. for end of day billing “sign off” before batching
  • Start using a paper process now so your patients get used to assigning their benefit for bulk billing.
  • Check that you have your SMS ID registered with ACMA.
  • Make sure your third-party products are ready and utilise your comms channels and online booking notices
  • Educate your clinicians and make sure your patients are ready.

It’s a lot, we know, but this is a legislative requirement, not a Best Practice initiative. As a result of this Government decision, we’ve changed our software to meet your legislative requirements. We understand it’s going to be disruptive, and we are working extremely hard to ensure we can help you navigate it.

Upgrading quickly has become more important than ever before. We have developed extensive resources located here, like patient education material (posters, waiting room videos), quick reference guides for clinicians, work processor letter templates if you wish to contact patients, frequently asked questions and more. In addition to this, we are running free webinars! If you’ve never attended a webinar before, you can’t miss this one. Please register here and share amongst your Practices.