How to activate new fee schedules

HealthTrack receives new Medicare and health fund fee schedules and pushes them to your database automatically. The new fees do not take effect straight away. You activate them when you are ready, through the Update Item Fees screen. This lets you finish end-of-month billing on the current pricing before the new schedule applies.

How new schedules reach your practice

New schedules are released more often than once a year, with the major Medicare update in November. Each time a new schedule is available, HealthTrack deploys it to your database automatically. You do not need to download or import anything.

Medicare and health fund schedules often arrive separately. Health fund updates can come through weeks after the Medicare schedule, so you may activate them at different times.

Our Fee Schedule Release Status article has information on which Health fund updates are available.

When new fees reach your database, HealthTrack emails the billing admin on record. The email lists the health funds included in the update.

The new fees sit in your database but stay inactive until you run Update Item Fees. Your existing pricing keeps applying until then, so you can complete end-of-month billing on the old schedule first.

Activate the new fees

Go to Admin > Billing > Add/Modify Billing Items.
Click Update Item Fees.

From the Update Item Fees menu, press Update Selected Item Fees to run the update. By default, this will also update the relevant Health Fund tables & practice fee rules.

Confirm the update. HealthTrack activates the new schedule. This takes a few seconds.

Practice fees recalculate automatically

If your practice fees are set to derive from the schedule fee, for example schedule fee plus $30 or schedule fee plus 10%, Update Item Fees recalculates them across the board using the latest Medicare schedule. You do not need to adjust those fees by hand.

For how to set up derived practice fees, see the How to add specific fees for Billing Items article.

Back-dated invoices use the right schedule

When you invoice for a service performed before the current schedule took effect, HealthTrack applies the schedule that was effective on the service date, not today's pricing. This works for both Medicare and health fund fees, so back-dated billing stays correct without any extra steps.