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HERAE and Raintree Systems Team Up to Offer Practice Management Solutions and Direct Deposit for the Healthcare Industry; VARs and Healthcare Providers Benefit With Seamless Integration, Shared Technology

Posted on: Monday, 31 October 2005, 12:00 CST

HERAE, LLC, a provider of electronic payment processing providing Direct Deposit for Healthcare(TM), and Raintree Systems, a custom practice management system developer, today announced a joint agreement to deliver a robust practice management and electronic payment processing solution for healthcare providers.

HERAE (pronounced "hurray") offers a HIPAA-compliant, patent-pending payment process that will work within Raintree's practice management software and process HIPAA 835 transactions and facilitate money transactions from insurers (payers) to healthcare providers' accounts electronically. The combined solution will also be available through select value add resellers (VARs) that are looking for an end-to-end system that will create additional provider value for their customers as HERAE moves claims information and payments electronically for healthcare providers. The HERAE component is new for VARs, not a replacement for existing offerings to the provider market.

HERAE says this is a natural partnership because Raintree Systems and HERAE have similar value propositions for the healthcare industry: find better ways to process information, manage workflow and reduce time on repetitive tasks such as cash posting and paper deposits.

"Raintree has been serving the healthcare industry for more than 20 years, providing a real solution to the challenges healthcare providers face today," said Jim Ribelin, executive vice president, operations and products at HERAE. "By pairing the HERAE system with Raintree's practice management software, the provider's office will gain efficiencies that work seamlessly and offer benefits that impact the bottom line almost immediately. In today's business climate, this is critical."

HERAE moves the information associated with healthcare claim payments between providers and payers electronically. The consistent paperless process transforms the HIPAA 835 transaction into standardized virtual remittance forms. The result is simpler and faster processing, the elimination of paper envelopes, checks and explanation of benefit (EOB) forms, and an expected overall savings of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of staff time for the providers and payers.

Raintree Systems sees the HERAE solution as a key piece to an effective practice management system that will enable groups to incorporate efficiencies into daily tasks in order to get to higher value tasks such as follow up on collections and report development.

"We think the integration of HIPAA 835 transactions and EFT into practice billing systems is the wave of the future. At Raintree we've seen an increased demand for this type of integration into our billing ledger product," said Stephen Welty, vice president of sales and marketing at Raintree. "The tools that HERAE has created are matchless and we see them as an important component for a complete practice management solution."

HERAE's offerings are all thin client, ASP-based, requiring its clients to have nothing more than a browser. For cash posting activities, HERAE's browser tiling software, ViewPoint, is installed on the local PC. When the transactions are completed, the data is conveniently stored in a database called the Electronic File Cabinet(TM).

HERAE's research identifies the average cost to a physician's office for traditional, manual processing of each payment envelope at as much as $9.20. This means physician offices spend as much as $5.5 billion a year to manually process claim payments. In addition, at an average cost of $0.42 per envelope, payers spend another $252 million a year to issue the payments by mail. HERAE's electronic processing solutions are expected to reduce operation and transaction costs for providers by as much as two-thirds and for healthcare payers by as much as 50 percent.

About Raintree Systems, Inc.

A privately held corporation based in Temecula, California, Raintree Systems, Inc. is a premier healthcare management software developer. Raintree provides healthcare companies in over 50 specialties with a feature rich and flexible suite of software management tools. Raintree's practice management and electronic health records solutions include integrated patient registration, scheduling, electronic health record documentation, billing/collections and management reporting in a single application. More information is available at www.raintreeinc.com or (800) 333-1033.

About HERAE, LLC

A privately owned limited liability corporation based in San Diego, California, HERAE provides Direct Deposit for Healthcare(TM). Through its unique focus on healthcare provider billing challenges and electronic remittance advice, HERAE has developed a paperless process with standardized explanation of benefits (EOB) forms, detailed reporting and process workflow enhancement capabilities that improve collections, reduce costs by up to two-thirds, and complete the payment to deposit cycle in 24-48 hours. On the Net: www.herae.com or call 888-41-HERAE (888-414-3723).

Source: Business Wire

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