It would be hard to find a health care practice that hasn’t experienced this unfortunate circumstance – a patient shows up for the first time expecting their insurance to be accepted by your office or that their insurance covered them for a specific procedure; when the patient learns that they were mistaken, they just leave.
First, it’s both time-consuming and stressful to have your patient standing at the counter while you’re either on the phone with the insurance company or navigating the insurance company’s website to establish the patient’s eligibility. And most front desk staff don’t have the luxury of having the time to do this research while other patients are waiting to make an appointment, the phones are ringing off the hook and/or other staff are trying to get their attention.
And to make matters worse, when the patient learns that they have no insurance coverage at your office, they bolt for the door, some becoming loud and argumentative about their unhappiness – not a pleasant situation for other patients in your reception area. Every time this happens, the practice suffers a loss of time and income that can never be recovered.
This is not just a “new patient” phenomenon. Every year existing patients may change their insurance companies or new network restrictions, of which the patient was unaware, become effective.
Wouldn’t it be nice if potential insurance problems could be resolved before the patient arrived for their appointment?
PatientStudio online forms can be the answer. Patients complete their forms at home and submit them to your office days or weeks in advance; to help ensure that the forms arrive timely, text and email form completion reminders are sent automatically.
When you receive the appropriate patient and insurance information before the patient’s appointment, staff can validate the patients’ insurance coverage and check their eligibility online, bypassing the telephone altogether. With proper practice management, front office staff can reserve some time at their own convenience and deal with multiple patients’ insurance eligibility all at once, without other pressures and much more efficiently.