Front Desk Checklist PDF for Better Urgent Care Billing

If you want to save your staff the pain of working denials, rejections, and other mistakes that show up on the back end of the rev cycle, ensure they’re getting everything right on the front end. Thorough training and standard operating procedures can drastically cut rework and improve your claim acceptance. We assembled a front desk checklist PDF to help your staff avoid/catch mistakes for not only a cleaner billing process, but also a better patient experience.

The checklist covers:

New patient check-in
Returning patient check-in
OccMed check-in
Patient check-out
End of Day tasks

You can download the PDF at the bottom, but let’s first go over a few things.

Foundational Training is Crucial

A checklist that captures every single possible scenario would be chaos. Everything from your payers to your tech have nuances that your staff needs to know how to handle. Your checklist should cover the basics, but within certain sections, like Real Time Eligibility (RTE), your staff needs to already know what to do when the response comes back.

So before you implement the front desk checklist, make sure you or your manager has this covered:

Tool Setup

It’s worth noting, too, that if you’re using something like a patient engagement (PE) tool for registration, you can really help your staff by setting up the required fields to match an optimal process for your team. If you’re not sure what that should look like, lean on your experts. Get feedback from the people using the system every day to learn what required fields make life easiest. You can also set up training or consultation with your vendor for guidance.

For example, some helpful required fields you can leverage in Experity’s PE solution include:

Driver’s license
Insurance cards
HIPPA and HIE forms (with customized timeframes to renew, e.g. every 6 months, annually, etc.)
Policy holder DOB

Tools like PE are designed to help you with your workflow. Make sure you’re getting everything out of it that you can so that it works the way you do.

New to patient engagement? We have a page dedicated to definitions, benefits, tools, and strategies for PE. Check it out >>

Sticky Spots in Patient Check-in Procedures

Unfortunately, because urgent care can be extremely busy, there are fussy little details that can be easily overlooked. We’ve tried to capture checkpoints in the PDF to help you avoid mistakes, but these are some examples to consider when setting up training along with expectations for using the checklist.

Address is usually correct on the insurance record but can be wrong on driver’s license
If a patient checks the wrong box or uses a nickname (Mike vs Michael) or alternate version of name (Jr, III, etc.,) it can result in duplicate entries
Policy holder information can be confusing for parents bringing in minors
RTE needs to be read and acted upon appropriately, not just run
Patient insurance can come back as inactive, but when checking the payer site, it’s active
When searching for an insurance name, checking by the PO box number can save time
Staff is at the mercy of your system admin when it comes to the OccMed process

Get the PDF Now

We hope you find this checklist useful regardless of the tools and processes you use. Again, it may be helpful to sit down with your front desk staff to ensure the PDF covers everything they need to do their jobs well. There are extra lines provided in all sections to help you customize it to your workflow.

Download the complete checklist; no form required:

Get My Front Desk Checklist

Need RCM Help? Our RCM experts use smart solutions and best practices to stay on top of revenue cycles and reimbursement. We provide full-service billing services and managed care contracting and credentialing for urgent care centers in many states. Click here to learn more about Revenue Cycle Management Through Experity.