Should you share benefit information with patients?

Understanding health benefits information is not only difficult and administratively burdensome for clinics but it’s also frustrating for patients.

Patients struggle with understanding their benefits even though there’s been significant improvements in payers’ patient portals.

A lot of clinics are hesitant to provide a full benefits walkthrough for several reasons:

1. They dont want to be responsible for giving patients wrong information due to misinformation communicated to them by payers
2. It takes time to walk patients through their benefits 
3. It’s hard to understand benefits, even for providers

For these reasons, many clinics don’t provide benefits to their patients.

Here are the reasons your clinic should provide:

1. The No Suprises Act which went into effect January 2022, requires clinics to give a good faith estimate of services to all uninsured and self pay insured patients. There is talk that this will eventually apply to insured patients 
2. Patients will appreciate the price transparency
3. There are third party solutions out there like One Body that can help you with eligibility checks and providing benefits explanations to patients

If you are interested in learning more about talking to patients about their benefits, please reach out to hello@onebodywellness.com!