At Reimbursement Rx, we believe that informed and happy patients make a physician's life much easier. This is why our aim is to help physicians understand the medical compensation system not only for their own behalf, but also for their patients' sake. 

With that said, we are now in beginning of the new year which means that insurance companies have just reset their rates and their deductibles for their members. This means that patients are likely to be liable for most if not all of their medical expenses for the next few months.

This means that all physicians should be looking to make financially conscious choices when it comes to treating their patients.  

This does NOT mean that we are suggesting physicians deny their patients any care they need, this just means that it's important to make sure that they are sent to the most cost-effective facilities, specialists, and labs do to any additional testing or treatment. 

For instance, the patients of primary care physicians will be charged a lot more to get any blood work or other routine testing done at a hospital or a medical foundation's lab or imaging facility compared to doing the same testing at an independent lab or independent imaging center. So even if it might be convenient and possibly faster to get blood work done at the local hospital, at the beginning of the year in a high deductible PPO world, this testing could cost a patient many times more than it would if they test was done at an independent facility. 

In addition, those patients needing such invasive procedures like colonoscopies should not be referred to hospitals or large foundations if possible, but rather should be referred to independent, stand alone surgery centers where, just like the lab testing, they will be charged much less for the same service. 

Unfortunately, this is not the information that insurance companies will readily tell their physicians, but this is crucial to understand in order to dutifully treat patients. 

Whether its routine lab work or invasive surgery, your patients don't know where to go for treatment until their physician directs them, which means that its on the physician to consider and look out for their patient's financial liabilities and directing them to the best course of treatment that takes both the medical aspect AND financial aspect into account.

Again, informed patients are happy patients, and happy patients make any physician's life much easier.

To see more examples on why physicians should look out for their patient's best financial interest , check out our video on the topic below: