Re: Best way to verify insurance benefits?

[Guest guest]

Agreed, I would love an answer to this. I've heard the Phreesia pad may help in this regard with insurance verification, but have heard mixed reviews.Frederick Elliott MDBuffalo, NY

I currently work for a company call zoomcare in their 1st (and so far

only) seattle office.

The company is based out of Portland, OR.

We do take most major insurances. I know we have a staff of benefit

checkers in the main Headquarters. I recall hearing about NEBO

systems or services which can verify insurance benefits online. Does

anyone have any experience with these services?

Today we have a patient come in for a visit. Apparently his insurance

card was way expired and it took an amazing amount of time for our

front desk staff to check him out, calling his parents trying to track

down the card. I don't know if a new check out procedure would avoid

this, but I wanted to ask about the online systems. It seems that an

unacceptably high amount of patients show up with no insurance card or

very expired one, and the additional work to solve this is starting to

be very disruptive to our patient flow.

I also don't know why people show up without the card and insist they

be seen and feel they don't have to pay anything because their mystery

insurance will pay eventually.

[Guest guest]

My new EMR, Athenahealth, does it. In fact, the system checks on the insurance a

couple of days ahead of time and we get an alert if there is an issue before the

patient comes in. We can do an instant eligibility check at check in as well.

Prior to this, I would sometimes find insurance issues when I did online

ordering of labs for quest diagnostics. If you have access to ordering labs

online, perhaps they can try to place an online lab request and find out if

insurance is eligible or not as a work-around. Of course the old-fashioned way

is to call each company but that is time-consuming.

Margaret

Re: Best way to verify insurance benefits?

 

Agreed, I would love an answer to this. I've heard the Phreesia pad may help in

this regard with insurance verification, but have heard mixed reviews.

Frederick Elliott MD

Buffalo, NY

On Apr 11, 2012, at 10:38 PM, < davidbfeig@... > wrote:

 

I currently work for a company call zoomcare in their 1st (and so far

only) seattle office.

The company is based out of Portland, OR.

We do take most major insurances. I know we have a staff of benefit

checkers in the main Headquarters. I recall hearing about NEBO

systems or services which can verify insurance benefits online. Does

anyone have any experience with these services?

Today we have a patient come in for a visit. Apparently his insurance

card was way expired and it took an amazing amount of time for our

front desk staff to check him out, calling his parents trying to track

down the card. I don't know if a new check out procedure would avoid

this, but I wanted to ask about the online systems. It seems that an

unacceptably high amount of patients show up with no insurance card or

very expired one, and the additional work to solve this is starting to

be very disruptive to our patient flow.

I also don't know why people show up without the card and insist they

be seen and feel they don't have to pay anything because their mystery

insurance will pay eventually.