I hear you Bert
Unfortunately in my neck of the woods because we are reimbursed so little you have to call the insurances and speak with them directly in regards to the patient's insurance status prior to seeing the patient for every visit. Not doing so will result in having to shut the doors and close the clinic. Going online is not enough. Not doing so will result in the doctor getting paid randomly. One of the reasons is that insurances here play a little game called coordination of benefits. This info needs to be updated on a regular bases by the patient. If this is not done by the patient, who will not do it 50% of the time until they have to, and despite the patient legally having insurance because they are paying premiums through their work, the doctor does not get paid until the patient updates their info. What we have encountered is that once the patient has been seen they are no longer interested in their responsibilities to get the doctor paid, and as a result the office has to spend much time chasing the patient to update the info, and once this is done the office has to chase the insurances to get them to pay the bill. This as well as the other issues listed in my first post as well as the risk of retribution by patients if you send them to collections, retribution such as having your car or office windows keyed as well as your good name blasphemed through out the community and in the cloud, by an irate patient who undoubtedly will move on to another clinic once sent to collections. We find the only reasonable solution is following an orderly process across the board. Patient schedules, we confirm and patient gets seen, and we get fully paid. As a result we loose very little money or patients because of billing issues. Event though it takes effort, we find more rewarding to put the effort up front than afterwards for the reasons mentioned above. Its not to say this is a better way of doing things, but if you want to run a successful solo practice in our neck of the woods it's something that we are forced to do.
God bless
Dru
