Validating patient coverage before you begin treatment is increasingly important. You run the risk of financial loss if you mistakenly accept or treat patients whom you believe are current members of a plan that your practice accepts or whose treatments you mistakenly believe are covered services.
You need an effective process and clearly assigned job duties to ensure validation of each patient’s coverage before you begin treatment. Take these four steps to minimize your risk of losses:
- Print out schedules one or two days early.
- Assign one employee to verify coverage for each patient on each day’s schedule.
- Flag the charts of any patients whose coverage the staffer could not validate.
- Photocopy both sides of patient insurance cards.
