Our medical billing system has the ability to generate letters asking our clients to supply information that was missing on the original order. We need this information in order to bill insurance.
The system generates two things: an edit report that our employees can use to fix any errors that might have been mis-keyed, and the other is the missing information letter, where we ask the client for the information.
The missing information letter is based on the edit report - i.e. we can set which edit report errors to print on the letters.
However, the missing information letters are limited to either include or exclude criteria, not both. E.g. we might want to include accounts that have certain errors, but exclude accounts that have other errors.
The result is that too many letters are generated by the computer, leaving us to manually go through the piles of letters and pull out the letters we don't want to print. At last check, the total number of letters the system generated was 24000 - and we only needed to send 10% of them.
We have remedied the paper waste somewhat by first printing the letters to a file, opening the file in Word, and deleting each page we don't need. It's quicker and wastes fewer trees.
My colleague is happy enough to use the Word method to get rid of letters she doesn't need before she prints them, but is now asked to keep a spreadsheet of all the letters sent, deleted, etc.
When I found that out, I told her I would give her a spreadsheet of all the accounts that are in her missing information file, so she can mark them deleted in her spreadsheet, rather than type the account numbers and such in excel.
Now I am thinking/hoping that there is a way to link the spreadsheet and the letter file, and basically, if the spreadsheet has the word "DELETE" in a column, that Word can look through the file and delete the page that corresponds with that account number.
If nothing else, this method would allow us to eliminate accounts where the computer has a record that we did the work, but we haven't received the paper copy of the order. We can generate an edit report/spreadsheet that shows these accounts.
The spreadsheet has the account number in Column A. I need for Word to find each account number, and then delete the page that displays that account number. I have never done cross-application macros before, so am not sure where to begin.
I would appreciate any help you can provide.
The system generates two things: an edit report that our employees can use to fix any errors that might have been mis-keyed, and the other is the missing information letter, where we ask the client for the information.
The missing information letter is based on the edit report - i.e. we can set which edit report errors to print on the letters.
However, the missing information letters are limited to either include or exclude criteria, not both. E.g. we might want to include accounts that have certain errors, but exclude accounts that have other errors.
The result is that too many letters are generated by the computer, leaving us to manually go through the piles of letters and pull out the letters we don't want to print. At last check, the total number of letters the system generated was 24000 - and we only needed to send 10% of them.
We have remedied the paper waste somewhat by first printing the letters to a file, opening the file in Word, and deleting each page we don't need. It's quicker and wastes fewer trees.
My colleague is happy enough to use the Word method to get rid of letters she doesn't need before she prints them, but is now asked to keep a spreadsheet of all the letters sent, deleted, etc.
When I found that out, I told her I would give her a spreadsheet of all the accounts that are in her missing information file, so she can mark them deleted in her spreadsheet, rather than type the account numbers and such in excel.
Now I am thinking/hoping that there is a way to link the spreadsheet and the letter file, and basically, if the spreadsheet has the word "DELETE" in a column, that Word can look through the file and delete the page that corresponds with that account number.
If nothing else, this method would allow us to eliminate accounts where the computer has a record that we did the work, but we haven't received the paper copy of the order. We can generate an edit report/spreadsheet that shows these accounts.
The spreadsheet has the account number in Column A. I need for Word to find each account number, and then delete the page that displays that account number. I have never done cross-application macros before, so am not sure where to begin.
I would appreciate any help you can provide.