The Eligibility Verification Time Suck

The following is a guest post by Vishal Gandhi, CEO of ClinicSpectrum as part of the Cost Effective Healthcare Workflow Series of blog posts.

Eligibility verification has always been a challenging part of running a healthcare business. However, that challenge has become even more difficult as the Affordable Care Act has caused a wave of newly insured patients along with patients who are switching insurance carriers flooding into physician offices. Verifying and learning the details of the patients’ new insurance policies has created a lot of new work for a clinic’s staff.

In the perfect world, there would be an automatic verification system that would easily look up a patient’s insurance policy and the details of their plan. While some companies are trying to make automatic insurance verification a reality, it’s currently very weak and still requires a lot of human intervention and interpretation. Maybe one day the payers will fix that, but until then it’s important that a practice creates a smooth process for verifying a patient’s insurance. In many cases this includes hours browsing insurance company websites and internet payer portals or waiting on hold for hours a day on automated voice systems or insurance company call trees. Is that the best use of your staff’s time?

I don’t think I need to describe in detail why having the insurance eligibility and plan details as early as possible is important. If you don’t have this information, your ability to get paid by the patient for the services rendered goes down and your claims denials go up. Plus, many of these new insurance policies are high deductible plans where you’ll need to collect a lot more money than usual from the patient. One way to solve this problem is to know how much the patient owes before or at least while they are in the office. The best opportunity to collect from a patient is when they are standing in front of you.

While internal staff can do a great job verifying insurance eligibility and obtaining benefits summaries, this can be a challenging job while handling all of the other front desk or billing duties as well. One solution to this problem is to outsource the eligibility verification task. A list of scheduled appointments is supplied to the outside company and after verifying insurance coverage for the patients they put the coverage details directly into your appointment scheduler. Obviously the key business question here is to compare the cost, timing, and quality of an outside service against the cost, timing and quality of your current staff doing it.

One related challenge that many practices are facing with all of these new and changing insurance policies is the time staff spend educating the patients. Most patients did not spend time really understanding the insurance policy they were buying. They looked at the price and largely bought without reading the fine print. This often means your staff are tasked with sharing the details of the policy and dealing with any fallout. In some ways, this isn’t a new task. However, the volume has increased.

Another solution offices should consider is doing the eligibility verification well before their appointment. Then, using a secure messaging solution the practice can share a patients’ eligibility and plan details including any co-pays and deductibles with the patient before they even arrive at the office. This early communication gives the patient time to call their insurance provider instead of your practice for all the details. Plus, it makes the patient payment expectation clear before the patient even enters your office.

How much time is your office spending verifying insurance? What solutions are you using to improve your eligibility checking and communication workflow?

The Cost Effective Healthcare Workflow Series of blog posts is sponsored by ClinicSpectrum, a leading provider of workflow automation solutions for healthcare. Their Eligibility verification service is a great way to leverage technology and people to solve the eligibility verification problem. ClinicSpectrum also offers a secure messaging product called MessageSpectrum.