VS CMS-1500 FORM-FILLERS

The CMS-1500 is the last ten minutes
of a nine-hour week.

A form-filler prints a clean claim form for very little money, and it does that job properly. What it cannot know is that the form is the end of the work — the units, the level suffix, the narrative log behind it, the overflow onto a B form, and whether anyone ever paid it. Here are the three you have probably priced, and where each one stops.

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Let us get the awkward part over with

We cost about thirty times a $79 form-filler. That is a fair thing to hold against us.

medclaimsoftware.com is $79 a year for the paper version. Solo here is $199 a month. You can do that division, and you should. If the claim form is genuinely the whole problem — if you bill four CMS-1500s a month and your documentation is already handled — then buy the $79 one and close this page with our blessing. It is the right purchase.

The rest of this page is for the counsellor billing thirty injured workers a week, in tenth-of-an-hour units, with a Word tracking log behind every claim form and an MCO sitting on $674.07. For her the form-filler is not the wrong product. It is the right product aimed at ten minutes of a nine-hour problem.

The form is not the work. Producing coded, timed, documented activity is the work. The form is where it gets written down last.

medclaimsoftware.com, paper$79 / yr
  electronic (837P)$289.95–$389.95 / yr
Speedy Claims, desktop$384.95 / yr
  cloud$659.95 / yr
EZClaim, first user$2,388 / yr
Med Claims Pro Solo, annual$1,908 / yr
Vendor pricing current as of July 2026 — verify
        with each vendor. Solo is $199/mo, or $159/mo billed annually.

The three you have probably priced

What each one is, and what it is honestly good at.

Product	What it is	Price	Where it stops for voc rehab
medclaimsoftware.com	Windows CMS-1500 and UB-04 form-filler. Prints alignment-perfect claim forms, keeps a list of what you printed.	$79/yr paper $289.95–$389.95/yr electronic (837P)	No fee schedules, no receivables, no documentation. You are the fee schedule and the reconciliation.
Speedy Claims / SpeedySoft	CMS-1500 suite with a basic ledger. A step up: it remembers payers and keeps simple balances.	$41.95/mo or $384.95/yr desktop $69.95/mo or $659.95/yr cloud	The ledger is a general one. It has no W-codes, no unit math, no tracking log, and no idea that one MCO check covers fourteen claimants.
EZClaim	Small-practice billing and practice management. A real product with scheduling and claim workflow behind it.	$199/mo first user +$149/mo each additional	Generic small-practice billing, not workers’-comp-native. No voc-rehab code families, no narrative reporting, no case-management day.

Vendor pricing and descriptions as published by each vendor; current as of July 2026 — verify with each vendor. All three are other companies’ products and we have no relationship with any of them.

The four missing halves

A form-filler has no concept of your day.

This is not a flaw. It is the category. A form-filler is a very good typewriter for one specific piece of paper. Here is everything that piece of paper is downstream of.

No concept of your day

Thirty to forty activities, in tenths of an hour, five days a week. W3220 for the notes you reviewed at 7:13 a.m. W3207 for the emails about authorisation #4. W3235 for the progress report. A form-filler opens with a blank CMS-1500 and asks you what to type in Box 24 — which means the activity log, the coding and the unit math all happened somewhere else first, by hand.

No fee schedules

It does not know that a plan-implementation W-code bills at $81.90 a unit at Level 1 and $84.40 at Level 2, or that an assessment code is $91.00, or that Ohio changes those rates every October. You type the dollar figure. If you type $81.19, nothing on the screen disagrees with you, and the payer will not tell you either.

No receivables

The moment the form prints, most form-fillers stop thinking about it. Nothing tracks that the bill went to MinuteMen on the 20th, that $57.57 arrived against $73.71, that $16.14 is missing, or that a different payer has been sitting on your money for sixty-one days. That tracking has to live somewhere — so it lives in a spreadsheet you maintain.

No documentation

In voc rehab the report travels with the bill. The weekly Client Tracking Log, in your Word template, matching the claim form line for line, filed in the client’s folder. A form-filler will never write a sentence of narrative, because the profession it was built for does not send one.

What a form-filler quietly makes you

Six lines to a page. Your week ran to nine.

Here is the moment every voc-rehab counsellor with a form-filler knows. The CMS-1500 holds six service lines. A normal week for one injured worker is nine, eleven, fourteen. So you start a B form: same claim number, same payer header, the remaining lines, the right page marking so bill review does not treat it as a duplicate and pay one of them.

A form-filler will happily let you do that, and will not check any of it. It also will not notice that the B form uses last October’s rate, that Box 15 wants the date of injury and Box 14 should be blank, or that this claimant’s MCO changed from ProMedica to Sheakley halfway through the case.

So the form-filler makes you four things: the fee schedule, the overflow logic, the file clerk, and the receivables ledger. You were already all four. The $79 simply does not change that.

What happens here instead

Units: 0.1 hours becomes the figure the form wants, priced at the code’s current rate for that level.
Overflow: Line seven starts a B form automatically, with the same claim number and the right payer header. C form after that.
Rates: Ship as data updates. New work uses new rates; historical activities keep theirs, the way an audit expects.
Filing: The PDF names itself and lands in the client’s CMS 1500 folder, the way you already name things.
After it is sent: The form becomes a tracked bill: billed date, payer, balance, days waiting, short-pay flag.

A generated CMS-1500 in Med Claims Pro with the MCO carrier block, W-code service lines, tenth-of-an-hour units and the claim number filled from the activity grid.

The claim form nobody typed. Carrier block, claim number, service lines, units and charges all came from the week’s activity grid — and the seventh line would have started a B form on its own. Invented names, real MCOs, real W-code rates.

Honestly

When a $79 form-filler is the right answer.

You bill a handful of forms a month

Four or five CMS-1500s, one or two payers, and your documentation is already handled some other way. There is no case for a $199 subscription here and we are not going to invent one.

Someone else does your documentation

If a partner, an assistant or a service already produces the coded activity and the narrative reports, then the form really is all that is left, and a form-filler covers it for the price of a lunch.

You are testing whether you even want this work

New to voc rehab, two clients, unsure whether the caseload grows. Spend $79. Come back when the Sunday evening starts.

And who we are not for at all. Chiropractic, physical therapy, behavioural health and physician offices — EZClaim, the practice-management vendors and daisyBill serve you properly and we do not. No procedure coding, no scheduling, no group-health payers. This is workers’-comp vocational rehabilitation and nurse case management, and nothing else.

The objections, in your words

“Is my claimant data going somewhere?”

No. Every claim, note and document lives in a database on your own computer, backed up on every launch and exportable any day. Our server holds your licence and nothing else — which is the same answer a desktop form-filler gives you, and one of the reasons people like those products. We did not want to lose it.

“My form-filler works fine. Why change?”

Then the question is not the form-filler — it is what surrounds it. If you type the same week into a daily log, a Word tracking log, the form-filler and a Bill Tracker, the form-filler is one of four typings, and the other three are the expensive ones. That comparison →

“Do you print alignment-perfect red-drop forms?”

Yes — and when a payer is not one of the packaged templates the form still generates, borrowing the blank and stamping that payer’s carrier block. Overflow to B and C forms is automatic at line seven, with the claim number carried across. How the CMS-1500 works →

“I already paid for this year.”

Fair. Run the fourteen-day trial anyway — no card — and keep the form-filler while you do it. Nothing here overwrites your existing files, and if it does not earn the difference you have lost nothing but an afternoon.

“What if it does not save the time you claim?”

Sixty-day money-back guarantee: if it has not given you back five hours a week by week eight, we refund it and export your data. No contract. Cancel and the software goes read-only rather than dark — your records stay yours.

Bring one real week to the demo and watch the forms build themselves, B form and all. Fifteen minutes, your state’s codes on screen. Or call: 1-877-843-1717.

The other alternatives: Excel and Word by hand · a 5–8% billing service · daisyBill · All four side by side

Questions, answered.

What does CMS-1500 software cost?

medclaimsoftware.com is $79 a year for the paper version and $289.95–$389.95 a year for the electronic 837P version. Speedy Claims is $41.95 a month or $384.95 a year on the desktop, $69.95 a month or $659.95 a year in the cloud. EZClaim is $199 a month for the first user plus $149 a month for each additional. Current as of July 2026 — verify with each vendor.

Do any of them know Ohio BWC W-codes?

No. They are general CMS-1500 tools built around procedure codes and general fee schedules. Ohio's voc-rehab code family — W3207, W3220, W3235, W3020, level suffixes, tenth-of-an-hour units, the October rate change — is a state-specific schedule for a profession none of them targets. You supply the codes and the dollar amounts by hand.

Will a form-filler handle a week that runs past six lines?

It will let you make a second form. It will not do it for you, will not carry the claim number and payer header across, and will not mark the pages so bill review treats them as one bill instead of a duplicate. Overflow to B and C forms at line seven is automatic here, because a nine-line week is normal in voc rehab and not an edge case.

Is EZClaim not basically the same price as you?

Close — $199 a month for the first user, and $149 for each one after, against $199 / $299 / $499 flat here. The difference is not price, it is fit: EZClaim is generic small-practice billing and practice management. It has no voc-rehab code families, no time grid, no narrative tracking logs and no workers'-comp-native receivables.

Can I keep my form-filler and use Med Claims Pro for the rest?

You could, but you would be typing the claim form twice. The forms generate here from the same activity grid that writes your daily log and your Word tracking log, so the form-filler becomes the one step you did not need to keep. Most people drop it at renewal rather than on day one.

Do you do electronic 837P submission like the paid tier of a form-filler?

Not today. Fax with a filed confirmation, portal-assisted and paper — which is the standard channel for Ohio voc-rehab MCO billing, and the confirmation filed in the client folder is your timely-filing proof. Direct e-billing for mandate states is on the roadmap and we will say so until it ships.

The CMS-1500 is the last ten minutesof a nine-hour week.