Life Skills Centers

Objective: Get the care and the billing into one place

Life Skills Centers, a Michigan behavioral health provider, runs day programs for adults with disabilities and mental health needs: community outings, skill building, and work preparation, across several locations. Every hour of service had to be recorded, tied to the right authorization, and billed to one of several regional health networks, each with its own rules.

That work lived in paper sign-in sheets, spreadsheets, and a lot of re-typing. Life Skills asked Web Ascender to build one system where staff record the day, and billing falls out of what they already entered.

What Web Ascender Did

• Attendance and time logging - program check-in and check-out, lunch, transportation, community and facility time, and group sizes, with fill-down tools so staff can log a whole room quickly
• Billing reports from the day’s work - rate tables, service codes, unit caps, and authorization checks turn time entries into billing reports, with errors flagged before anything is submitted
• Electronic claims (837) - HIPAA 5010 claim files generated from approved billing reports, built and tested against each regional network’s own requirements, with resubmit and regenerate tools when a claim needs correcting
• Remittance reconciliation (835) - payment files read back in, matched to every claim and service line, with adjustment codes explained, payment status tracked, and a search by EOB number for audits
• Private pay - customizable invoices for participants who pay directly
• Daily progress logs and care plans - participant profiles and assessments, monthly goals, daily progress logs, weekly notes, periodic reviews, and signatures, with reminders when something is due
• Outcomes and compliance reporting - outcomes reports, attendance and community-time metrics, satisfaction and exit surveys (including anonymous surveys), accessibility reports, risk assessments, and incident reports
• Dashboards - alerts for expiring and missing authorizations
• Roles and permissions - administrators, program managers, lead staff, and a read-only auditor role, with a change history on the records that matter
• New programs and networks - added a new regional network’s billing rules and a memory-care program as Life Skills grew
• The website - the public WordPress site, including an online job application
• Hosting and long-term support - servers, backups, upgrades, and ongoing changes as payer requirements shifted, and finally a clean, documented archive of the system

The Outcome

Staff recorded the day once, and that record became the progress note, the outcomes report, and the claim. Life Skills ran its programs and billing on the platform for years. It’s the kind of system we build for organizations whose software has to follow rules that someone else writes.

The claims illustration uses sample data, not real participant records.