Some of our clients will send us an e-mail with the name of the claimant and his contact info and saying “please take care of it.” I know what that means.
It means that our company needs to contact the patient and get whatever information that is lacking in order to bill the case. It is typically necessary to find out where and when the next appointment is to then provide transportation and interpretation for the patient. Our office then must call and confirm appointments with the medical facilities, the patient, the case manager, and possibly the adjuster.
On other occasions we receive a call informing us that a patient has a couple of appointments coming up at a certain location. Perhaps the case manager is on the road and doesn’t have access to all the information at the moment. In this case, we usually do an internet search for the facility, call them up and ascertain the date and times of the appointments for the patient.
For us this is not really a big deal. It is how we do business every day. It would appear that perhaps what we do is not so common. I have been hearing complaints that when our clients call other companies outside of our area of service, they run into real problems. Some agencies have trouble dealing with partial information. They lack the flexibility to work with the client in this matter. For instance if they are told that an appointment is at 8:00am it is often common for them to send an interpreter at that time without calling the facility first to confirm the actual appointment time. Maybe the appointment really is at 9:00am. Well I guess they feel that it really doesn’t matter since it was the client’s mistake and the client will have to pay for it.
Sure, the extra hour cannot be billed if we discover the error ahead of time, but it does foster good will. We help prevent our client from losing money and time, while fostering a relationship based on trust.
