Home Forums Discussions Problems Billing for DNKA

How do you bill for No Show charges? Do you create a special procedure code in order to be able to create a superbill?

I apologize in advance if I've missed this somewhere.

I've been using AC for the last 2 weeks. My nurse practitioner joined in this week, and we start with a new billing company next week. So far, it has been fairly smooth.

Our office policy is to charge for any appointment missed by a patient or not cancelled at least 24 hrs in advance. We do make exceptions for illness (although I don't really understand the reasoning of missing a doctor's visit if you are sick), car mishaps or other factors out of the patients control, and sometimes just to be nice to nice people.

Our annual explanation of all the HIPAA compliance and office policies is signed by the patient and explains our missed appointment charge. We don't use a superbill; we send a statement as a miscellaneous charge, since no insurer will pay or credit a missed appointment to a patient deductible. Medicare does allow direct billing of the patient for missed appointments.

In my mind, there is no downside to charging a ?no-show? fee:
- if you collect, it partially defrays the loss of income (and you can still have the time for another task, or go home early).
- if you can?t collect, you get an early indication that this is a patient who disrespects your time. In our office, we don't reschedule until we have a credit card number for the fee. If they don?t pay, they are terminated, and I avoid writing off a larger fee, after services are rendered.
- if its actually excusable, you get ?nice guy? points for waiving the charge, which the patient remembers the next time you run late or mess up their charges.

Let?s be real, where else but a physician?s office can you get so many free services without coming in or paying for them (refills, referral calls, record keeping, etc.)? Showing up or canceling is the least one can do.

John:

Sorry I was not clearer. We have a very similar, long-established policy regarding charges for missed visits. We also have patients acknowledge receipt of our written office policies at the same time they acknowledge receipt/being offered a copy of the HIPAA policy.

My question was more about the mechanics of doing this in AC. I've set up a letter template for these charges. However, if we want our new billing company to bill the patient don't they need a superbill? Is there a miscellany code that we could use just in order to generate that superbill?

Thanks,
Jeff

Sorry about the mix-up. We don't use AC to print out "paper" superbills, we use our billing company's software, so we don't submit an CPT code for chart copying, missed appointments and so forth.

Well, this was our first week with the new billing company, and only my third using AC for all patient visits. Somehow, at first I missed the Add New CPT Code function. After finding that I've simply added "No Show" as a CPT code so we can create an invoice suitable for upload.