turbomed pioneered the idea of a producing a new account for each treatment. This is now considered the best way to submit medical accounts. Each treatment has a unique reference number, its own diagnostic and tariff codes and gets processed and paid separately without any confusion. In practice, a patient can have multiple accounts, but this does not matter since turbomed automatically duplicates account details so there is no time lost re-typing this information.

Data management is significantly improved. The data for each treatment remains complete and unchanged and is suitable for detailed financial and clinical statistical use. Additionally old accounts can be archived and removed leaving a small pool of the most valuable recent data for processing. Managing the data size makes it technically possible for the programme to run with all data in RAM memory which is significantly faster than other programmes that need to retrieve data from conventional databases.

All accounts are age listed showing the general financial state of the practice in terms of debtor days outstanding. The lists can be sorted or searched to instantly find any specific information. Data capture for new accounts is automated with field completion and the ability to re-use diagnostic and tariff code sequences using existing accounts as templates.

All turbomed functions use ‘point and click’ to select and process accounts. You can print, EDI or email accounts and handle payments. turbomed automatically records events using date-stamps and can locate due accounts for no-month-end billing. You can manually add “to-do reminders” and let turbomed keep track of them. turbomed provides interactive financial and practice management reports to help plan and manage your practice.

turbomed can communicate using email. Anything that turbomed prints (accounts, receipts, statements, reports, etc) can be ‘printed’ as identical JPG files that can be emailed. turbomed also provides SMS data (for Clickatell’s server via email) and EDI for several vendors.

Apart from Internet communication, turbomed can export data to Microsoft Office Suite. For example Excel is ideal for producing graphs from financial or practice management data and MSWord can produce mail merge form letters and tables to print tick-off lists and phone lists.

The turbomed general purpose ‘export fields’ function can export any fields you choose. Some users use MSWord to make HTML files to list selected account fields on their PDA’s or cell phones. Similarly you can transfer contact data from turbomed to Outlook for emailing and automatic phone dialling.

In terms of data management turbomed uses the standard Windows file system and stores data as comma separated text (CSV) format using the file extension ‘.TMD’. This simplifies backing up and storage. The programme has the ability to remove inactive account data after 3 years. All deleted accounts data is stored in archive files and can be viewed using turbomed as normal turbomed data files.