What if a patient has no insurance card?

It happens constantly. A patient arrives with no card, or with a card that turns out to be dead, and their record shows no coverage on file.

You do not have to give up and bill them as self pay. On the patient’s page, click Find insurance for this patient. The system searches the payers at once for any active coverage on record for that person.

Before it runs it shows you the price of the search and says plainly that it contacts the payers for real. Nothing happens until you confirm. Nothing is filed while it is looking.

If it finds active coverage, it files it straight onto the patient’s record, effective and ready for the visit. If it finds nothing, it says so rather than guessing.

That small search fee is often the price of finding money you would otherwise write off. It is worth running in two moments:

• Before the visit, when the front desk cannot produce a card.
• After a coverage denial, when the payer says the patient was not active that day. See What if the coverage was not active that day?.

Once the coverage is on file, resubmit the claim as a corrected claim. The whole history stays, so you can always see the first try and the fix.