How Do You Verify Patients’ Healthcare Insurance?
- Insurance verification maximizes your cash flow, minimizes your denied claims and keeps your patients happy.
- Insurance verification confirms your patient’s coverage and benefits, while insurance authorization gives you a green light to provide certain services.
- The insurance verification process involves collecting patient insurance information and verifying it with the insurer.
- This article is for medical practitioners looking to learn the ins and outs of insurance verification.
Let’s say you have a great encounter with a patient and feel good that you’ve provided a satisfactory patient experience. That excitement can come crashing down if you find out that your patient’s insurance information was inaccurate and your claims were denied. Proper insurance verification before a patient encounter can avoid this undesirable outcome. The good news is that the verification process is nowhere near as tough as it’s often made out to be.
What is insurance verification?
Insurance verification is the process of confirming a patient’s insurance coverage and benefits prior to an encounter. More importantly, it’s the process of confirming that a patient’s insurance plan covers the services you provide and is in your network. If not, you can either block the patient from seeing you or inform them that they will have to pay entirely out of pocket for your services.
In some medical practices, the front-office staff handles insurance verification. In this case, insurance verification can comprise a staggering portion of a staff member’s workday. If you’d rather ensure that your front-office staff has ample time to interact with patients, you can outsource insurance verification to third-party medical billing companies. Our reviews of the best medical billing and coding services can help you decide which company, whether it’s the user-friendly Kareo or the highly customizable AdvancedMD, might be best for you.