Healthcare.gov: What to Tell Patients in Under 2 Minutes

We are constantly being asked how a physician’s office can accommodate the various questions coming from patients with regard to the affordable care act. This little piece from medical practice insider may be a good “cheat sheet” for your office staff to use.

A few days before the federal and state health insurance marketplaces went live, Glenn Stream, MD, warned that physician practices would face a lot of questions from patients.

“The biggest issue will be educating current patients, those who have insurance and may be considering a change, and especially those who don’t have coverage and may be looking to buy insurance through the exchanges,” Stream, who is a former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), told Medical Practice Insider.

To that end, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) offered three tips to share with patients to help them create accounts and explore the exchanges. And they come down to browser and email basics.

• If you haven’t received your account verification email, check your inbox and your spam folder for an email from HHS with the subject line “Marketplace account created.”
• If you’re having trouble creating an account, be aware that HHS has reset email addresses in its system to clear out any problems. Try again using your email address, but you may need to choose a new username.
• If pages appear to load slowly, be patient. Sometimes, it helps to clear out the web browser’s history and cache, close the browser completely and try again.

The current tumult in the implementation of some of the issues with the ACA are making management even more imperative. We are currently assisting physician practices perform the analysis of profitability based on the criteria and payment schedules for each carrier on a practice specific basis.