How to Ensure a Smooth Urgent Care Billing Experience – A Patient’s Perspective

The A-B-C’s of Urgent Care billing

Ensuring that the services received at an Urgent Care facility gets properly billed and subsequently reimbursed by the patient’s health plan, requires taking the right steps from the very beginning. Due to the natural convenience associated with Urgent Care centers where patients can quickly receive the medical attention they need without having to wait for long periods of time, it is often seen that the choice of the center (or ‘place of service’, as referred to in more technical, bill-friendly verbiage) becomes a wrong one, leading to problems afterwards with the Urgent Care billing process.

So what are the primary aspects of selecting the best facility, especially when the choices are many and it is so easy to get confused? What are the essential things to remember when picking an UC center from a list of available facilities in your area? Let’s find out.

Making the right choice

One of the foremost concerns while selecting an Urgent Care Center to visit, especially if you are looking to get maximum coverage under your health plan and be exempted from the need to pay any co-pays or out-of-pocket expenses, is to ensure that the facility is in-network. Even though most Urgent Care Centers will claim to accept most major insurances, and also offer affordable self-pay options, it helps to eliminate nasty surprises afterwards if you make the effort to find out the requisite details before receiving the service. And one of the best ways to do that is ask at the front desk, quoting your policy no. or calling up your insurance company directly and getting your queries answered by them.

Once you have that box checked, it’s time to consider a few other important things regarding the service you are looking for. Some of the typical questions that may rise in this respect are:

• Does the facility have qualified and experienced medical professionals?

• Do they see patients of all ages?

• Do you need a prior appointment and how long are you expected to wait on an average before a doctor sees you?

• Is the facility affiliated with any hospitals?

You can finally consider aspects like the proximity of the center, its business hours and other such allied matters, and then zero in on the best choice for your specific requirement.

Last but not the least, don’t forget to carry your insurance card so that all the requisite information can be collected by the facility, which will eventually help in ensuring a smooth and uneventful Urgent Care billing experience for both you and the provider.