Is your practice still manually verifying patients’ medical insurance eligibility? This process can be incredibly time-consuming and costly for every patient you handle. According to an MGMA report, the average practice spends 12.64 minutes to manually check a single patient’s insurance. If your practice sees 40 patients a day, this adds up to 8.4 hours spent on insurance eligibility verification daily.
This report clearly indicates that one of your staff members must dedicate an entire workday solely to checking insurance. Switching to medical insurance eligibility software helps your practices streamline this process, saving both time and money.
Medical Insurance Eligibility Verification
Medical insurance eligibility verification is checking the patient’s insurance coverage and ensuring that the medications or procedures your patients take are included in the coverage. Staff need to check the patient’s coverage is active without exceeding the annual or lifetime limits.
Your practice staff needs patient information for the verification of insurance coverage. It includes,
- Demographic information including name, date of birth, address, etc.
- Patient’s insurance carrier information including insurance company’s name, policy number, and the patient’s insurance ID
- Patient’s insurance plan details by contacting the insurance company
What is Medical Insurance Eligibility Verification Software?
Medical insurance verification software automates the process of checking your patient’s insurance. This software collects data from multiple sources to check the prescribed treatment and medications covered by the patient’s insurance plan. In recent years, many practices have adopted verification software to drive operational efficiency and optimize revenue collection.
CERTIFY Health offers practices an industry-leading automated insurance verification capability to reduce administrative workload and claim fraud. With our platform, instantly verify your patients’ insurance and check their current benefits coverage.
What Makes Medical Insurance Eligibility Software so Crucial for Practices?
Did you know that 2 out of 5 claim denials are due to insurance coverage? As a result, practices create billing and collections issues, adding time to your staff’s busy schedules, increasing time to collect payments, and creating patient satisfaction problems. To reduce these losses, practices should invest in insurance eligibility verification software. With this software, practices can maintain a steady, reliable cash flow, and increases your staff’s productivity.
With automated eligibility verification, reduce the administrative burden on your staff, leveraging them to focus on patient care. Furthermore, clear communication about your patient’s insurance coverage helps build trust and satisfaction.
Benefits of Using Medical Insurance Eligibility Verification Software
1. Reduced Risk of Bad Debt
In the healthcare industry, errors in insurance claims are frequent and expensive. However, insurance verification software empowers your staff to accurately retrieve patients’ insurance information with a single click. This software pulls data from multiple sources to provide you with accurate and reliable coverage information.
By utilizing this technology, your staff can significantly reduce billing errors and avoid disputes with insurance companies. Practices can ensure they only bill for services covered by the patient’s insurance, and provide information on non-covered procedures, leading to a more efficient billing process and more educated patients.
2. Improved Patient Experience
Billing errors and delays can affect your patients, causing unnecessary stress. A common complaint among patients is the mismatch between the actual costs and estimated costs. Some patients struggle to settle their outstanding bills, when practices fail to provide clarity about amounts due.
Automated insurance eligibility checks help patients to plan for their financial obligations. Patients experience greater satisfaction with their overall payment process, while practices benefit from fewer payment delays.
3. Increased Revenue
The cost of eligibility errors extends beyond the revenue lost through claim denials. If practice’s fails to check insurance information, practices need to bear:
- The burden of financial and productivity loss
- Delayed patient payments
- Reputational Damage
Eligibility verification software can uncover hidden errors, ensuring that claims and communications are precise from the beginning. By reducing denials and identifying missing coverage, this software maximizes reimbursement and improves the patient payment process.
Features to Look for When Considering Medical Insurance Eligibility Software
- Instantly confirm your patient eligibility with real-time updates, avoiding reimbursement issues.
- With a user-friendly interface, insurance eligibility verification standardizes responses from multiple payers, allowing registrars to access patient details in a consistent format.
- Utilize detailed reporting and analytics to gain performance insights and help staff identify improvement opportunities.
- Ensure the tool integrates with electronic health records to verify your patient information quickly.
Automated Insurance Verification: A Smart Investment?
The best insurance verification software is a smart investment for your practice, as it reduces your billing errors and claim denials leading to improved cash flow. It streamlines administrative processes and enhances patient satisfaction by providing accurate and timely eligibility information. Ultimately, it allows practices to focus more on patient care rather than administrative tasks.
