Back to Work
Published January 20, 2012 | 
Now that the holidays are over it is time we go back to work and prepare for a new year. And that means that almost everyone will owe another yearly deductible, may have changed insurances, may owe more for copays and most offices renew every patient’s signatures on the billing and authorization forms. The Front Office, Admission, Registration people will need to be spend a little bit more time with each patient to ensure that they have updated copies of the patient’s insurance cards, their photo ids, addresses and phone numbers.
Surprisingly, more and more people are changing their phone numbers on a fairly regular basis and holidays are the time that most phone companies are offering better deals to switch services. And, more and more people are turning off their land-lines and just using cell-phones as their main contact numbers. Updating a person’s contact information is very important not only for the Front Office Personnel to call and confirm appointments but the doctors and nurses may need to call the patient with results and, of course, the billing and collection people may need to call the patient about their balances.
When asking for a patient’s deductible payment prior to services you will need to know if they have received services anywhere else prior to the appointment with your office. Some patients may have already gone to the Emergency Room for services and depending on the timing, their billing practices, and even the deductible amount the patient may have already met their deductible with that visit. Most of your patients will have changed their insurances and/or their copayment amounts may have increased, as with everything else.
You will need to encourage patients to confirm that they are still within their network prior to making an appointment with your office. And if not, the least you can do is confirm it for them. There is nothing worse that finding out when you arrive or when you leave your appointment that you owe more than you have planned. Training your scheduling personnel in helping the patients with this information prior to scheduling saves a lot of misunderstanding and bad public relations.
What is that Smell
Published May 27, 2011 | Here is a subject that is not really discussed and that is smells that you have to deal with at work. Being in a medical office setting we have to deal with a variety of things and keep our composure. Most of us have to deal with sick patients and they may have their own kinds of smells depending on the sickness. And we have to be careful of what perfume, powders and lotions we use because what we wear can affect our patients and our co-workers. Sick patients have compromised immune systems and perfumes, lotions and powders will make them feel worse and unable to breath sometimes. In an enclosed office your co-workers can be affected as well. The best practice is to not wear anything at all. Always go to work with just the smell of your soap.
There are a variety of different articles on the web discussing this very subject. Most are studies about how perfume adversely affect asthma patients but most of them discuss the chemicals in perfumes and lotions that people are not aware of that can affect their health as well as their patients.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/228365-perfume-health-risks/
And here is a video from a doctor about his office policy of his patients and staff not wearing perfumes and why:
What Online Tools Do You Use
Published April 13, 2011 | What Online Tools Do You Use for your patient registrations? Utilizing whatever tools you can to ensure that you get accurate and timely information on ALL of your registrations is important for you keeping your job as well as making sure that your company stays in business. With the advent of the Red Flag Laws we are required to ensure that our patients are who they say they are. There is also the the ever increasing problem of patients seeking medical care just to get prescriptions for drugs who will tell you wrong information. This is especially true in Emergency Rooms across the country and with the EMTALA ruling we are required to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. I am not advocating turning patients away or making them wait a long time for service but you should treat each registration of the patient as a new patient and confirm everything when they come in as well as ask for positive ID and their insurance cards. You cannot get a 100% accuracy rate but you can come close.
To that end we use a variety of online tools to ensure that the information we get from patients is current and accurate. To verify a drivers license you can try online verifications offered through your state’s DMV. To verify addresses you should try the postal service www.usps.com by putting in the address but not the zip code. They will tell you if the address is valid and deliverable. You should also try a reverse directory website for checking phone numbers and addresses. One of these that does not charge is www.whitepages.com. And you can use your county’s property appraiser’s website to verify an address and the owner.
Lastly, you should considered purchasing and using on online insurance verifications website such as Passport and Emdeon. Passport has the ability to verify social security numbers and have a wide variety of payers as well. They also have a payer address and claims information database that is fairly decent. WebMD or Emdeon is a very nice service as well. Now these are pay-for-use services and you will have to negotiate your own rates with them. You can also take advantage of the free services offered by each of the major insurance carriers. Availity is offered by our Medicare intermediary for free to Medicare and Blue Cross providers. Of Course, Tricare has an online eligibility verification system that is free to providers. United Healthcare offers their providers with online verification as well as the ability to view their insurance cards should a patient forget to bring one with them.
These are just some of the many tools available for Patient Access Reps or Insurance Clerks (whatever term your employers uses for Registrars) that can be used to help you do your jobs effectively and efficiently. It will also help your billing and collections department do their job in a timely manner. The name of the game is to ensure accuracy of information, entering information into your computer system correctly and make sure that the claims go to the right insurance as quickly as possible to get the money back.
Telemedicine
Published March 16, 2011 | Do you know what telemedicine is? It sounds like patients are receiving medical care through their televisions. That is not too far off. There is a growing trend of medical professionals consulting on patient care through the use of video conferencing. We have seen a stand alone device much like a robot with a high resolution video camera that can transmit real-time images of patients to doctors from anywhere in the world. Now you are wondering what this has to do with any registrar or patient access person? Well, the answer to that is really simple, no matter what fantastic technology medical researchers come up the patient still needs to be charged for that service and as a Registration person we have to make sure that the patient’s demographic and insurance information is gotten from the referring facility and keyed into our billing system.
Generally, the patient is not seen or available prior to this type of service but we are still tasked with ensuring the information received from the referring facility or doctor is accurate. Every facility has their own version of a “Facesheet” with patient information and their own policies about transmitting patient information via fax or email. So, before your medical personnel agree to this service we would hope that there is an agreement as to the minimum amount of information that must be available to satisfy your own billing requirements. We would assume that includes the patient’s name, address, telephone number, date of birth, social security number, sex, race, religious preference, employer, next of kin contact info as well as complete billing information. A copy of the patient’s identification and front-and-back copies of the insurance cards would be a plus. Each of these data points should be gotten just in case that patient ends of being transferred to your own facility. Remember you will need to verify as much of this information as you can using your online tools.