Q:How do I bill for a no show/late cancellation?

A: Whether submitting a first session note form, or subsequent session note form, under the status of the appointment’s duration, indicate the appointment’s full duration (if the client was scheduled to see you for an hour, indicate one hour). When completing the rest of the form, you will select either “late cancel” or “no show”. You will then be able to scroll down to the bottom of the form and click on submit.

Note: For all Counselling and Life Smart services, no show and late cancellation appointments are paid at 50% of your hourly rate, which will be automatically calculated by the portal once you indicate attendance status on your submission.

Q:How do I get all of my notes printed from my forms?

A: Before you click on the submit button at the bottom of any form, click on the printer icon that appears at the top right hand corner of the form Clicking on the printer icon will open the printer prompt and allow you to send the print job to your printer.

If you are using Google Chrome, the page will print as shown on the portal. If you are using Internet Explorer, you will need to change the layout to “landscape” so that it fits onto the page.

Should you have lots of notes in one of the free-form fields and a scroll bar appears, you will need to expand the field in order to make all of the notes visible before you print. Otherwise, the information hiding below will not be seen. To expand the field, click and drag on the diagonal lines at the bottom right hand corner of the box until all of your notes are visible and the vertical scroll bar disappears.

Q:How do I submit a Request for an Extension?

A: Within the case, go to the same drop down menu where you would typically submit the First Session Assessment and Subsequent Session forms. Within this drop down menu, select the Case Review/Request for Extension event and add event.

Once the event appears, complete all fields, including the Rationale for Request. If a new Treatment Goal is identified and requires a new case, clearly indicate the new issue. For reference of the available issues/problem codes, refer to the drop down menu in a First Session Assessment form. Choose Submit and Close once completed.

You will receive a response back within 3-4 business days.

To view the response, click on the “view” link that appears next to your submited request. Scroll down to the “Additional Comments” section (blue “Internal Use only” box) at the bottom to see the response. It is important to always read the response as there may be specific clinical and/or administrative direction to be followed.

Q:A client was referred to me but I wasn’t able to get in touch with them to set up a first appointment. How do I remove this from my “cases awaiting first appointment” section of my portal?

A: Please send an email to cscadmin@homewoodhealth.com and a member of our Client Services Centre Administrative team will be able to assist you further.

Q:I’m a bit behind in submitting my notes through the Provider Portal. Will I be paid for sessions that occurred over 30 days ago if I am only submitting them today?

A: Homewood Health does not reimburse Service Providers for EFAP (Counselling, Life Smart, Formal Referral, On-Call) sessions submitted 30 days beyond the appointment date. The 30 day invoice/payment limit is a standard business practice. We want to remind you that for clinical and legal purposes, we require that notes be submitted, ideally on the same day as the session and no longer than one (1) week past the session date.

Q:A case just disappeared from my dashboard. How do I get it back?

A: When a case no longer appears on your dashboard, it is usually due to the case being closed. When a case is closed, it is removed from your dashboard. Should you wish to view previous notes or retrieve a client’s contact information for a case that has been closed, you can do a search for the case by clicking on the “Service/Event Search” tab and inputting the case number or the client’s name in the respective fields and then clicking on the “search button”.

Your search results will appear below and you can either click on the case number to bring up the case, or click on the client’s name to bring up her contact information.

If the case in question has not been closed, but you cannot locate it on your dashboard, try sorting the list of cases on your dashboard by clicking on the column heading “Case ID” or “Client Name”. Clicking on either of these headings will re-sort your listings.

If you have multiple open/active cases, you may need to scroll through several pages of cases before you locate the one you need. This is an example of a provider will multiple pages of active cases. To know which page you are currently viewing, the white square surrounds the current page.

Q:I notice a discrepancy between what I billed for and what I received. Who should I contact?

A: Please contact your Regional Administrator (see complete list under the Contact Us tab) for support with EFAP cases. Our administrators can help you resolve these types of discrepancies.

For support with cases for non-EFAP related services, please contact the individual program contact, listed under Contact Us.

Q:If I haven’t seen a client in over 90 days, and they contact me to resume counselling, what do I do?

A: The Provider Portal will automatically close cases if there has not been activity in a 90-day period. If a client contacts you and wishes to resume counselling, please refer the client back to the Client Services Centre (CSC). The Intake Counsellors will re-confirm the client’s eligibility and then re-refer the client back to you. Depending on the client’s eligibility, the old case may be re-opened, or a new case assigned.

Q:How do I upload documents to the case in the Provider Portal?

A: Click on the “Documents” tab located at the bottom of the case and click on the “Add” button.

Click on the browse button to retrieve the file you wish to upload –

Then select the document type:

Then click on the “Save” button.

The file will then appear, as noted below.

*** If you have accidentally uploaded the incorrect document, please contact your Regional Administrator who can remove it for you.

In order to mitigate any glitches and provide you with the best Portal experience as possible, please consider the following tips before you escalate any errors to your Regional Administrator:

• 1. Ensure you are using the correct link: https://providerportal.homewoodhealth.com/
• 2. Ensure the speed of your internet is greater than 50 mbps. To test this, go to www.fast.com. This is the lowest acceptable speed for working in an internet-based program.
  
• 3. Ensure your internet browser is up to date – we recommend using Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Chrome or Firefox. To ensure your browser is up to date, go to www.whatismybrowser.com. You will see something like this:
  
  If your browser is not up to date, the site will provide you with steps on how to update it. Keeping your browser up to date increases security, which is vitally important when working with Homewood Health clients.
• 4. The Provider Portal is not mobile friendly. Many drop-downs and other display features will not function properly if you try to use your mobile device, tablet or iPAD. Please use a laptop or desktop computer. The Portal was designed this way to prevent users from accessing private and confidential information in public, like many do on their phones and tablets (coffee shops, library, etc.) As we recommend Service Providers to enter their notes immediately after seeing the client, there is no reason to access the Provider Portal from a mobile device.
• 5. If experiencing problems with the portal, try to access it via a different browser. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Firefox are all different. If problems persist with Chrome, switch to Firefox to see if the issues improve or better yet, disappear.
• 6. Clear your cache: When you use a browser like Chrome, it saves some information from websites in its cache and cookies. Clearing them fixes certain problems, like loading or formatting issues on websites, like ours.
  This will not erase passwords.

  If you are using Chrome, click on “CTL + SHIFT+ DELETE”.

  A window like this will appear. Click on “Clear Data”.
• 7. When in the portal, don’t leave any forms open and unattended. Always save your work and close the form. If you leave it open for too long, the security of our portal, for that specific page, will expire (and you may see “invalid token” as an error). If this happens, and you try to complete your notes, your notes may save as “blank” since our security will reject the data as the security of the page is no longer valid. This means you will have to re-do them all over again.
• 8. If you receive an “error 500” on your web page, it means that the Provider Portal’s background programs are running too many at once, and that you are likely using the portal during a high-traffic time of the day. We recommend you log out, grab a cup of coffee, and then try again in 5 minutes. You may need to log out and in again several times before this error disappears. If the error persists, it’s time to contact your Regional Administrator.
• 9. Some Service Providers report that the Provider Portal can be slow – it takes a while for the page to load, or clicking on a button or link takes a while to respond. Homewood’s technology team is investigating and working on improvements to the portal’s performance.
• 10. When contacting your Regional Administrator, please provide screen shots of the error and confirm the speed of your internet, that your browser is up to date, and that you’ve cleared your cache. Indicate if the error persists regardless of which browser you use.
• 11. [Object Object] Error: If you experience an [object object] error you likely have a VPN installed interrupting your portal access. Please ensure you do not have a VPN installed as this will cause the error as VPN is not needed to use the portal. Once the VPN is uninstalled, you will no longer experience this issue.

Internet Connection problems: A particular website may fail to load if you do not have an internet connection. Check that your device is connected, for example, via a LAN or Wi-Fi.

Your antivirus is blocking site access: Your antivirus might block access to some sites or even all of them. You may need to temporarily disable it and see whether the ‘taking too long’ error is resolved.

DNS cache: The DNS (Domain Name System) is what translates domain names to IP addresses. This is because it is easier for browsers to ‘read’ IP addresses (which are made up of 4 sets of digits separated by a period as in the image below), while it is easier for humans to remember text, which is why domain names are made up of text as in www.abc.com. DNS results are usually cached in order to make sure that subsequent requests are handled faster. If there was a communication problem between client and server, it may be cached, resulting in the ‘website took too long to respond’ error. Flushing the DNS cache should solve the error.

Outdated Extensions: Extensions come in handy to add necessary features to help improve your browser’s functionality. However, they may not be as frequently updated for compatibility with web browsers. Outdated extensions may contribute to communication problems between client and server. You also cannot be sure that the extensions will work as intended. On Chrome, virus scanning extensions, for example, Symantec, outdated or not, tend to be ‘heavy’, which slows down your browser.

Browsing History: Stored data from browsing sessions (saved passwords, cookies, site names, and URLs, as well as cache) can contribute to client-server communication problems. The stored data contains the name and URL of the particular site that you are trying to access. If it had connection issues before, it will refer to the browser history and the client-server connection will fail.

Chrome’s default profile folder issues: There is a folder named ‘Default’ on your local machine which store’s your ‘Chrome Profile’ (your bookmarks, saved passwords, apps, browser settings, and extensions). If there is corrupted content in the folder, it may affect communication between client and server. You may need to edit or rename this file in order to fix ‘taking too long’ issues. The issues that may result in a corrupted default folder include corrupt files that are locally stored in the cache folder or interference from a 3rd party antivirus.

Your browser contains corrupted files: Your browser may contain corrupted files. These can affect how the client communicates with the browser. Reinstalling the web browser might solve this problem.

Connectivity Tests: After encountering the ‘taking too long to load’ error, a great approach is to rule out the most obvious causes, for example, internet connectivity. Check that you do have a functional internet connection and that it works on other sites and devices.

Change Devices: Try and access the site using another device. For example, if you are using a PC, you may want to try to access the site on a mobile device. If it works on the other device, then there is a possibility that your device is unable to communicate with the server. After eliminating internet connection issues, it is time to try other fixes. Let’s look at fixes to problems that may arise from your device being unable to communicate with the server.