Business Unit

We have created a new concept in the software, Business Units, to facilitate dividing locations into groups for reporting purposes. 

Users often want to simply group their service locations for reporting purposes. The business unit setup for locations gives users the ability to easily do this using only the “Service Location" business unit field.

However, for practices that do frequent work at hospitals, they may want to allocate financials based on patients' originating offices, instead of based on the hospital itself. In this case, the hospital Service Location business unit can be set to defer to the Patient Location (and then that location's Patient Location business unit will be used).

When calculating the business unit for a certain transaction, the system will look at the related claim’s Service Location and Patient Location and make the following determination:

1. If the business unit for the Service Location allocation on the Service Location is set…
   1. …to a business unit, it will select the corresponding business unit.
   2. …to “Patient Location,” then…
      • If the business unit for the Patient Location allocation on the Claim Patient Location is set up, then it will select the corresponding business unit.
      • If the business unit for the Patient Location allocation on the Claim Patient Location is not set, the transaction will be considered uncategorized.
2. Otherwise, if the business unit for the Service Location Allocation on the Service Location is not set, the transaction will be considered uncategorized.

Let’s say I have five locations – North Office, North Audiology, West Office, West Audiology, and Mercy Hospital. I want to split my financials into two business units – North and West. Patients from all these locations may go to Mercy Hospital for procedures.

Here’s how I would set this up:

In this setup, financials on claims where service location is North Office or North Audiology are allocated to North. Financials on claims where service location is West Office or West Audiology are allocated to West. And if the service location is Mercy Hospital, it defers to the Patient Location on the claim.

If this patient location is North Office or North Audiology, it still allocates to the North, and West Office and West Audiology still allocate to the West. However, I leave my patient location allocation for Mercy Hospital blank – if someone has set this up as a patient location in a patient chart, they’ve made a mistake, and I want the business unit to remain uncategorized until I can resolve it.

iSalus has plans to integrate Business Unit into all primary financial reporting. For now, Business Unit is available as a grouping on the new Financial Snapshot Connect report, and you can find out more about how to use this report here. 

Here is an example of this report when set up to show Financials by Business Unit by Rendering Provider: