Does insurance verification have you down, frustrated, and overwhelmed?
What if you changed your thoughts and did not give the verification process power?
We have a few helpful tips outside of outsourcing insurance verification.
A lot will depend on how your business office looks. Are you a one-person show, or do you have two or more people on your admin team?
The first recommendation is to gather the insurance information when the new patient calls in. Then you can verify the benefits before the patient’s appointment. That will eliminate the clinical team waiting on benefits and cutting into their appointment time. If you do not have access to all insurance online, we recommend doing that. It frees up a lot of phone time, and you can get better information online than you can via fax. This will also cut down on the number of calls you have to make. If you have enough “manpower,” perhaps each person can take a column or two from the schedule to work through.
If it’s an existing patient and “nothing has changed,” print out the previous year’s benefit form and you can quickly hop online and confirm the current plan is the same, verify the maximum, and if any benefits have been used. Since the form is already filled out, it will take minimal time to verify. When confirming, you can simply ask if there have been any changes in their dental benefits. You might ask, “how do I know if their insurance is the same?” If you’re using a messaging platform, you can add the verbiage to the confirmation message.
If you have a lot of patients within the same company, you can create a master benefits form. Leave the following information blank:
Insured/DOB Maximum
Patient/DOB Used to date
Subscriber # Deductible met
and History
This form will be filled out almost all the way, and you’ll only have to fill in the blanks applicable to each insured/patient. Store them in a notebook organized by the employer, make copies as needed.
