How to verify insurance for a physical therapy patient

Insurance verification is the process of communicating with an insurance company about a patient’s eligibility to receive insurance coverage. Verification occurs before a patient undergoes a therapy session. The purpose of insurance verification is to let a care provider know if a patient’s insurance plan can financially support their services. If a person’s insurance does not cover the services of your practices, you can choose to either decline to provide services to this person or offer services on the condition that they agree to pay for the services on their own accord.

Typically, the administrative staff at the front desk of your practice might handle the insurance verification process, which can be extremely time consuming. Some practices choose to work with third-party providers that can streamline the process. How your practice chooses to verify insurance is completely up to you, but it may be smart to consider the pros and cons of different methods.

How do I verify insurance? What are the basic steps? 

• Collecting insurance information — One of the first steps of the verification process involves gathering patient information. For some clinics, this step happens when a patient visits the front desk. The information to collect includes a patient ID number, policy number, group number and even the insurance provider’s phone number. It’s also important to make sure you have all of your patient’s essential personal information. This includes a full name and birth date.

• Talking to the insurer — Once you have gathered all the information necessary, the next step is to reach out to the insurance provider. You should make a phone call to a company representative who can confirm the patient’s insurance information. Talking to the insurer is the most time-consuming part of the process. This is because busy call volumes cause long wait times. It can also take several days for an insurer to provide information after your verification request.

• Organizing insurance information into an EMR system — Many electronic medical record (EMR) systems have insurance verification capabilities built in. These streamline the verification process for your administrative team. The capabilities can vary from company to company. But generally, EMR systems are a great way to simplify the time-consuming process. Most systems involve task management, scheduling and documentation features. Some of these features might specifically include things like autocalculation of units by insurance, insurance authorization tasks, and insurance indicators next to scheduled appointments.

If you’re someone who is involved in your physical therapy clinic’s documentation process, this article is for you. Whether you’re on the administrative team, you’re a physical therapist or you’re the practice owner, you’d benefit from taking note of the complexity of this process and how EMR systems can simplify it. If you’re a newer physical therapy practice owner and are unsure how to verify insurance for your patients, EMR systems can be great resources to make verifications quick and easy.

How important is it to verify insurance for a physical therapy patient?

Patients can change insurance or lose insurance coverage at any point, which is why it’s important to verify coverage and benefits with an insurance provider before every session with a therapist. Regular verification can prevent claims from being denied, promote regular cash flow for your clinic and protect your customers from unexpected costs.

AgileEMR can help you streamline how you verify your insurance

AgileEMR is a health care practice management software solution designed for therapists and created by therapists. We officially launched our software in 2013 to get to the root of the issues that physical therapists and clinicians frequently run into with generic clinical EMR systems: None of them were created with physical therapy in mind. We consulted with physical therapists and physiotherapy clinicians when developing our physical therapy software. This was how we could confidently ensure that our software program meets the demands of this unique health care field. Since launching, AgileEMR has been used in more than 1 million patient cases by all kinds of providers in the outpatient physical therapy and hospital rehabilitation fields. We know that EMR systems are driving the future of outpatient physical therapy. To learn more, read our blog posts including 6 features physical therapists should look for in an electronic medical record system. To see our physical therapy and rehabilitation partners, click here.

If you’re a physical therapy clinic owner and you’re looking for more information on EMR systems or the features of our EMR program, look no further. We’re confident that our program can simplify how your practice verifies insurance and can help keep your physical therapy clinic running smoothly. 

Contact our team today for more information or to schedule a demo to see how AgileEMR can help you verify insurance at your practice.