Medical Expense Tracking 7.0

Most patients will agree that tracking medical charges, insurance payments, and account balances is a formidable task. It might be a simple task if the experience only involved the patient and the doctor, but the involvement of third party payers (ie, private insurance companies, Medicare, etc.) complicates the experience beyond the comprehension of most patients and family members. There are annual deductibles, coinsurance payments, and co-pays that defy most simple household accounting methods - many of us give up in desperation and simply pay what ever we are told. Hopefully the amounts are accurate.

This database was created to assist the tracking of charges, annual deductibles, coinsurance limits, co-pays, insurance payments, patient payments, and residual balances.

You will most likely find that MET will serve to track medical expenses and payments by most insurers, including Medicare.

MET provides the user an interface to record and summarize an insurance plan benefit periods approved charges, deductibles, coinsurance amounts, co-pays, insurance payments, patient payments, and remaining unpaid balances. The user can generate reports for individuals covered by separate policies and/or family policies including multiple family members, or a combination of the two. With this reporting ability, it is possible to monitor when deductible or coinsurance limits have been reached or exceeded, verifying the accuracy with which your insurance company applies the limits in your policy contract.

But in addition to tracking expenses covered by insurance, the user probably will have a strong interest in tracking his/her tax-deductible medical expenses, including those not covered by insurance as well as those that are. MET is quite versatile and will allow the creation of tax or calender year medical expense/payment reports for a single individual or for those who wish to file taxes jointly.

Tax deductible expenses that are often ignored are the travel expenses encountered in obtaining medical/dental treatment. In the simplest form, you may only desire to track your automobile mileage. When medical care involves travel to health care centers outside your hometown, travel via public transportation, parking, tolls, meals, and lodging may be deductible. These expenses too can be tracked by the MET software package.

MET has the capacity to tract medical expenses for a single individual or a large family. Expenses can be tracked for a single year or for multiple years. As alluded to above, multiple individual insurance policies and/or family policies can be tracked.

Searches and sorting of data can be done by a number of criteria: patient name, date of medical service, provider of the medical service, and outstanding unpaid balances. These criteria are built into the program and can be initiated with the click or a button. This facility makes it easy to return to an earlier created record to edit the record or add payments as they are made by your insurance company or by you. Entry of data from your insurance EOBs will additionally allow you to verify the accuracy of charges and insurance reimbursements. Your financial responsibilities will become more clearly defined and better understood.

MET provides a great opportunity for organizing your medical expenses, resulting in a much improved & enlarged understanding of the medical charge and reimbursement system. Regular use of MET will signficantly reduce the end-of-the-year scramble to round up records of medical charges and payments, greatly facilitating tax report preparations. The better organization of these potential tax deductions will save you time, effort, and, most importantly, money.