Tracking a bill: submissions, claim status, EOR & follow-up
Step 1 — Open the underpaid bill from the dashboard
Start on your dashboard. Today's Focus ranks every open bill by what's recoverable — and the top action here is a processed bill that came back badly underpaid. Open it. The dashboard surfaces the bills that need a human before they age out of their appeal window.
Step 2 — Read the payment cycle and the variance flag
Up top, the payment cycle shows exactly where the bill stands — queued, accepted, and now processed. Mindbill does the variance math for you: this bill was paid at just 12% of the Medical-Legal Fee Schedule, $7,561 below what's owed, flagged right on the header. A flag like this is your signal that the EOR needs a response, not a write-off.
Step 3 — Find the Submissions tabs
A bill is rarely sent just once — over its life it can go out as the Original 837, a Duplicate re-send, a Corrected (frequency-7) replacement, a Second Review (SBR-1), and an IBR-1. The Submissions panel on the bill detail page (a layers icon with a count badge of how many discrete transmissions the bill has had) shows one tab per transmission, in chronological order — the leftmost tab is the Original send and the rightmost is the latest. Mindbill opens on the latest transmission by default, because that's usually the one you're working. The tabs are derived purely from the bill's own history, so there's nothing to maintain; a never-transmitted draft shows no Submissions panel at all.
Step 4 — Read each submission's four fixed fields
Click a tab and the panel shows four fields for that submission: Type of Submission (Original, Duplicate, Corrected, Second Review, or IBR, color-badged), Method of Delivery (e-Bill (837), Fax, Email, Mail, PDF, Portal, or Phone), Date Sent, and the 277 result. The 277 field reads either 277 Accept with a green check and the accept date, or 277 Reject in red with the reject date — or 'Awaiting 277' while the acknowledgment is still pending. Data Dimensions submissions may also show an extra note for portal-only statuses: paper routes mean mailed delivery with no electronic response file, Awaiting Payor Claim to Be Filed means DD is retrying the payer claim feed for about 5 days, and Claim Not on File means the biller should verify payer, claim number, patient spelling, DOB, DOI, and claim activity. Below the fields is the processing flow — 837 Sent → 277 Accept (or Reject, or Pending) → a days pill — and once the payer processes the submission, the days pill shows the whole calendar days from Date Sent to the EOR (e.g. '130 days'), so you can see exactly how slow (or fast) a given transmission was turned around. When a submission has been processed, a row shows the Payment (or Denial) Effective Date with a badge attributing the EOR to that stage, so on a long-running dispute you can tell whether the dollars landed against the Original, the Second Review, or the IBR.
Step 5 — Walk the transmission history
The bill history is the full paper trail behind those tabs: the 837 dispatched to the payer, the 277 acknowledgment, and the EOR received — here, $1,033.25 paid against the $8,594.00 bill. Every event is timestamped, so when a payer disputes timing you already have the proof assembled on the bill.
Step 6 — Read the per-line EOR
Down in the service lines, Mindbill posts the payment line by line — charged, fee-schedule allowed, paid, and the balance still due. Each line carries its own variance percentage: here the record-review (MLPRR) line came back paid at just 9%, leaving the bulk of the balance open. The per-line view is how you catch exactly which line the payer downcoded.
Step 7 — Open the full EOR / 835
Open the full EOR to read the 835 the payer sent — billed, allowed, paid, and the adjustment on every line, with the carrier's reason code. Here it's CO-45: charge exceeds fee schedule. Mindbill decodes the CAS codes inline so you rarely need to read raw X12 or download a PDF EOR.
Step 8 — See the claim status roll up on the injury
On the right, the injury rolls up the claim status across all of its bills — rejections, no-response, payments, and denials — so you can see the whole claim at a glance, not just this one bill. That roll-up is how you triage a claim with several bills in different states without opening each one.
Step 9 — The follow-up task: what's next
Here's the payoff: because the bill is below 99% of the fee schedule, Mindbill spawns the next action — a Second Review. It auto-generates the SBR-1, tracks the 90-day appeal clock, and estimates what's recoverable (here ~$4,688 at the 62% historical SR collection rate). That's track-a-bill, end to end: from the submission tabs that record every send, the EOR turns directly into the correct next step.
Once a bill is submitted, tracking it is how you turn an EOR into the right next action — from the submission tabs that record each transmission, to the payer's payment, to the explanation of review, to the one task that tells you what to do next. Mindbill shows every send as its own Submissions tab, posts each EOR line by line against the Medical-Legal Fee Schedule, rolls the claim status up across the whole injury, and spawns the follow-up automatically when a payer shorts you. (The example below is a real sandbox bill — #3, Jason Miller / Liberty Mutual — paid $1,033.25 of $8,594.00, just 12% of MLFS.)