With some clearinghouses and payers, you’ll need to import these ERA files manually into MacPractice in order to handle them within MacPractice. This article covers how to manually import an ERA into MacPractice.
Do note that this article will not cover how to acquire ERA files to manually import for all clearinghouses and payers. Each clearinghouse has a different process for how to acquire these. We will cover how to do this with our clearinghouse partners, but other clearinghouses and payers you will need to consult that source’s materials to locate how to find and download the ERA files.
Ensuring ERA Manager is enabled
You’ll need to make sure that you have the ERA Manager enabled on your license. You can check and see if you have the ERA Manager by navigating to the Managers Ability in MacPractice. You should see “ERA Manager” in the sidebar:
Downloading ERAs
Each clearinghouse and payer will have a different method for accessing their ERAs. We’ll cover our partners below, but if you need to get an ERA from a Payer or Clearinghouse not covered below, you may need to consult with that clearinghouse or payer’s support materials to locate these.
Inovalon ERAs
You can locate ERAs from Inovalon in the Remit Payments option under the Collections Tab:
From the resulting page, you can check which ERAs you wish to download then click the download button to download them all.
To import ERAs into MacPractice:
Your ERA files downloaded may be in a different file format than MacPractice expects. MacPractice expects these files to have “.ARA” at the end of them, however many payers and clearinghouses use different formats, such as .era, or .835.
You’ll simply need to rename these files to end with .ARA at the end of them.
Once you have done this, you’ll need to open your Finder application on your Mac computer. Once you’ve opened up Finder, you can hold down Shift and the Command keys and press “G“ to bring up a “Go to” prompt.
Copy and paste this path into this field:
~/Library/Application Support/MacPracticeClient/Databases/
This will take you to a folder that will have your database name as a sub-folder. This will in almost all cases be “macpractice” unless your database has a different name.
Open this folder, then the “Claims Template” folder inside it. Once you have changed the extension of the ERA files to .ara as described above, place the renamed file(s) in this folder.
Lastly, once all desired ERA files have been placed in the Claim Templates folder, go to the eClaims ability in the client's MacPractice. Select the Reports node in the sidebar, hold down the Option key on your keyboard, then click the Receive button.
The new file(s) should now be visible in the ERA Manager.