Program facilitates Attorney General Lisa Madigan's state-mandated need for hospital’s to identify eligibility and enroll patients in Charity Care and Medicaid.
Waukegan, IL (PRWEB) March 24, 2006 -- The R&B Solutions Rapid Application for Medical Programs (RAMP), a trademarked web-based and stand-alone software solution that automizes the process for determining Medicaid and Charity Care eligibility, serves as a direct facilitator to meet and exceed many of the proposed requirements in Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s recent “Charity Care” initiative.
The House Health Care Availability and Access Committee accepted Madigan’s Illinois House Bill 5000 proposal, which sets terms that a hospital must provide full charity care and automatic discounts to Illinois residents in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. The first bill, the Tax-Exempt Hospital Responsibility Act, will ensure that hospitals taking advantage of tax-exemptions earn that privilege by investing at least eight percent of total operating costs in care for poor and uninsured patients. The accompanying legislation, the Hospital Fair Billing and Collection Practices Act, will require all tax-exempt and for-profit Illinois hospitals to avoid unfairly aggressive and harassing tactics when seeking payment from patients.
“R&B has been contracted by hospitals for twenty years in assisting hospital Patients apply for medical assistance and qualify for charity care and other financial assistance programs,” said Dennis A. Brebner, President and CEO of R&B Solutions, Inc. “R&B is a professional patient advocate organization that can attest to the strong commitment of Illinois Hospitals to assist their patients as their organization’s mission.”
The program was developed as a result of R&B’s experience with the application process of Charity Care and Medicaid through its Medicaid Advocacy and Solutions for Uninsured Patients departments. For nearly 20 years, R&B Solutions has supplemented hospital’s growing need for Medicaid and other charity applications, and in the process developed its own software to compliment their needs and those of the uninsured that they were working for. The web-based program helps to correctly identify self-pay patients who are eligible for charity care, Medicaid, Crime Victims, and other public assistance programs, and auto-populates that information into the necessary forms with electronic signature verification. The program vastly improves the timely efficiency crucial to meeting the government deadlines on such assistance.
Madigan has said, “My effort is intended to set a clear standard for tax-exempt hospitals to follow, and consequently, to improve the provision of care for the poor and uninsured. The legislation is specifically refined to consider the mission and the work of tax-exempt hospitals and to allow them to preserve their tax-exempt status to build on their current efforts to provide care to those who need it.” RAMP is directly aimed at that endeavor. There are currently over 1.8 million uninsured individuals in Illinois that comprise fourteen percent of the state’s population.
“One of the real solutions in health care is leveraging technology for greater productivity. R&B’s RAMP program has been designed to automate the medical assistance and charity care processes. RAMP also provides the record database of the hospital’s efforts for compliance and to demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts. RAMP also delivers credit products to expedite the process and to provide identity verification and identity fraud and theft alerts. This is a real solution to help with some of the difficulty caused by uninsured citizens,” concluded Brebner.
For immediate release
Contact: Ryan Brebner
847-887-8514
March 22, 2006
About R&B Solutions
R&B Solutions is a leading Medicaid Advocacy corporation that both debtors and medical associations alike have come to trust to solve many of the problems facing uninsured patients and the medical facilities from which they seek help. R&B Solutions offers a wide variety of payment solutions for companies to decrease the amount of bad debt to hospitals and other medical-assistance facility services and their patients. The company uses highly-trained customer service representatives efficient in state human services protocol, internally developed software, and years of legal experience to identify and recover a significant amount of any past due amounts. R&B Solutions offers expertise in the field of Medicaid Advocacy (inpatient solution), Solutions for Uninsured Patients (SUP), outpatient solutions, and RAMP, Rapid Application for Medical Programs, a proprietary software that screens for Medicaid and charity eligibility. Founded in 1986, R&B employs over one hundred personnel and covers eight states that support 85 hospitals. Visit us at randbsolutions.com
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