As per the ATO, Medical services are GST-free. A medical service is either one of the following:
a service for which a Medicare benefit is payable
any other service supplied by or on behalf of a medical practitioner or approved pathology practitioner that is generally accepted in the medical profession as being necessary for the appropriate treatment of the recipient of the supply.
Therefore, the item code fee amounts Tyro Health Online pre-populates for Medicare Online and DVA claims don’t include GST – the SUBTOTAL and TOTAL lines don’t automatically add GST either.
Applying GST to certain DVA items
For Medicare, DVA, and ECLIPSE claims, there’s no option to flag a service as “GST applicable” – Services Australia only accept a single item fee amount, which may include an additional 10% for GST.
For DVA providers that have entered into a Recipient Created Tax Invoice (RCTI) Agreement which permits Services Australia to automatically add GST to claimed taxable items (read more about the RCTI agreement), simply submit a total amount via Tyro Health Online and DVA will consider the supply GST inclusive – this involves overriding the item fee amount pre-populated by Tyro Health Online, adding 10%.
If you submit a total amount including GST-taxable supplies and then are paid the amount less GST (10%), then this is due to the provider not having entered into the RCTI Agreement with the DVA.
For some other insurers in Tyro Health Online, such as Comcare, icare, and WSV, there’s a way to flag a service as GST applicable (see ‘GST applied’ check box, under ‘payment codes’ / ‘service items’) which adds the GST (10%) to the item’s fee amount – the invoice then shows:
SUBTOTAL, which adds up all item code fees, exclusive of GST;
GST AMOUNT, which adds up the GST applied amounts for relevant items; and
TOTAL, which adds up all the item code fee amounts, and any GST applied.
If you have any questions, click on the pink chat bubble on our website or email our Customer Support team.