James, oh ok. We have a lot of permutations of BCBS and other insurance plans also. Once I kinda figured out some things about the migration tool, I found it helpful especially for cleaning that stuff up. But the database seems to have some problems, and some of this may be whether things are explained fully.
I've just gone through codifying some insurance plans and migrating some patients. But I noticed that in some cases the address in the database is not the address listed on the insurance card. (United Healthcare for one). Or the Payor ID (for electronic submission of claims) is not the one on the card. While I may not expect them to get the entire database exactly correct (or, maybe I do) I do expect the Payor ID to be correct. And since they are requiring the address, I would expect them to correctly pre-load into the database the correct addresses for the largest insurers (All the Blues, Aetna, United Healthcare, Oxford, Cigna, 1199, and HIP). Maybe there are smaller plans that they have not yet added (like Conventry or PayorFusion). At least they are small here. And I am assuming the want the address to which claims are sent. If not, they need to say so.
There is also the issue of requiring and insurer name and the "plan name." Does that mean I really need to put in "Aetna" in one field and "Aetna Choice POS II" in the other? I hope not. If so, that should have been set up for Aetna initially, because 1) Aetna has about a zillion different plan names (and they keep adding them) and 2) Currently all I send to the Office Ally clearinghouse is "Aetna".
I think codifying the insurance companies is great. It is helping me clean up my list. But I do feel that for the major companies they should have prepared the needed information in the database. Of course, I'm assuming that this (largest, most used insurers) is only 10-15 insurers. I could be grossly underestimating that.
I guess on problem with Blue Cross is if one patient has say, BCBS of Alabama and it is only listed as BC/BS. Then another patient has BCBS of Florida and it is listed as....BC/BS. Doh! Yeah, we have that issues, only now all those people left in our system are only former patients so it doesn't matter what I do.
