Insurance claim forms

Re: Insurance claim forms

Fiona Leathers — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:22:06 GMT

I'm dealing with a client at the moment who cannot get the gist of a percetage excess with Petplan. He comes in & rants at me because we are no longer doing direct claims for him - he took too long with claim forms, percetange excess, he wouldn't pay the remainder of his bill etc etc.

Seemingly Petplan told him, we had to do a direct claim and he didn't have to pay the excess, so I said I would phone Petplan while he was there & put it on speaker phone, so we could both hear what was being said.

Since that phone call, he's still ranting about the excess but he has paid his bills on time (no money, no drugs) and he brings a claim form in every time, signed!!!!

What can you????? The general public are stuuuuupppppppiiiiiiiddddddddd

Re: Insurance claim forms

GemRVN — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:11:11 GMT

I do get the odd "stroppy" client complaining about the fee, but fortunately as i don't work on the reception desk i don't get the grief!!!! Hehehehe. I do have the head recpetionist (she's the only one with the brain) who deals with the debts and she will help me out with the easy claims but only as far as printing the invoices off for me!!!

I try to keep on top of the insurance of the practice and learnt not to take 2 holidays within a month of each other at the end of the practice financial year!!!!!!!!!!! xxx

Re: Insurance claim forms

Victoria Lee RVN VPAC D32/33 — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:34:31 GMT

I process all the claims at our practice. I'm a VN and employed solely as an Accounts Manager (which initially was debt and insurance but the insurance side has grown so big that there's two of us now, me mainly on the insurance side and my colleague managing the client accounts and debt) I complete just over 900 claims a month mostly claim direct. We dont claim direct with E&L, petinsurance.co.uk (E&L in disguise) and animalfriends (were assoc with E&L now changed but wont send a cheque only do bacs payments which is ridiculously cumbersome and hard to manage in a practice our size). We are directly authorised with the FSA and I would encourage other larger practices to do the same. Claims turnaround is 24-48 hours (unless I'm on holiday!) and all claims are logged and photocopied before leaving the premises. As with Gem above, I deal with all insurance queries inc history requests and up until fairly recently we offered free advice to clients seeking an insurance policy. This did become too time consuming as the demand for this service was ridiculous and due to the FSA regs took about half an hour to get all the information across. We now have a standard sheet with policy recommendations and all the relevant information on. We do not (and never will) charge for processing claims forms. Clients have enough to pay with premiums and excesses both of which will no doubt rise during the credit crunch. The whole point of encouraging your clients to take up insurance is that vets get to do what they want in respect of work ups etc without any difficult money related problems. Our practice remains profitable largely because of insured clients and insurance companies making payments. With the volume of claims we process if is therefore worth having a dedicated experienced member of staff to process claims and deal with the fallout when there are problems. I have complained on a clients behalf on many an occasion, got a county court judge to request telephone transcripts, written FSA complaint letters for my clients and won my battles on many an occasion! Again all this is provided free of charge to our clients as part of our insurance advice. Many of our clients see it as a god given right to have claim direct and the experience of myself and my colleauges at their beck and call, many of the referrals we see appreciate our work a whole lot more but I wish some of our regulars could experience what its like at most practices, they would die of shock if someone asked them to pay for treatment or dare I say it pay an admin fee!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: Insurance claim forms

GemRVN — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:58:49 GMT

I do pretty everything in the practice to do with the insurance. This goes from advising clients to filling out the forms to dealing with the queries. Our receptionists won't even send a history unless i have checked it!!! It can be a pain in the butt at times but at least i know that there won't be many problems. I used to share the duties with a fellow nurse who hated doing them and would moan and complain constantly about them. Nearly all the ones that had queries were hers and i was left to sort them out and she only did the mega easy ones!!!!! So now i'm on my own, i probably do on average about 15-20 a week and i have to do them in my own time.

Anyhow, we do charge £5.00 per form but only if the claim is coming directly to us. We do not take direct payment from E&L as they take too pigging long to pay out (6 months is our record). We are Pet Plan approved and have a lot of elderly clients who struggle with form filling in which i'm happy to do for them. I do get satisfaction out of doing them especially the biggies!!! If the boss is happy then so am i!!! xxx

Re: Insurance claim forms

Doolally — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:20:56 GMT

[quote user="Bouncyfi"]

[quote user="Doolally"]

, they then called me back later to refund me as petplan had paid the fee!

[/quote]

You're lucky Petplan paid, cos when we were doing our Appointed Representative stuff, they said they would not pay for any fees incurred for processing claims - they should be covered by the owner

[/quote]I know! They do clearly state that they won't pay for any administrative fees, and it clealy said on the invoice that the £10 was for processing the claims form, it was a direct claim for a big bill so it must've jsut somehow got overlooked

Re: Insurance claim forms

Vicky RVN — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:52:36 GMT

We get quiet a lot of claims coming in, which our practice manager fills in, leaving us nurses to nurse When i first started at my current practice we charged a subsequent consult fee, but now we charge nothing.

Re: Insurance claim forms

Fiona Leathers — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:35:26 GMT

[quote user="Doolally"]

, they then called me back later to refund me as petplan had paid the fee!

[/quote]

You're lucky Petplan paid, cos when we were doing our Appointed Representative stuff, they said they would not pay for any fees incurred for processing claims - they should be covered by the owner

Re: Insurance claim forms

loobylou — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:20:43 GMT

I do think its good we do have so many insured clients as we, unlike some local practices havn't been affected by the 'credit crunch' yet.

Re: Insurance claim forms

Doolally — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:02:40 GMT

We don't charge...but the vets I took my horse to for a ligament injury charged me £10 to process my claims form, they then called me back later to refund me as petplan had paid the fee!

Re: Insurance claim forms

dinkyd — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:03:42 GMT

I do the claims for our practice and we dont charge - we are the same as loobylou averaging about 80 if not more in a month - its crazy - but good that so many clients have their pets insured.

Re: Insurance claim forms

Charlotte says smile — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:18:27 GMT

we dont charge anything, im quite suprised that people charge i might mention it to the partners tomorrow, we do get such a high volume of insurance claims. Although recently we have been having far more requests for direct claims which we obviously wont accept from E+L but we have said we will do direct claims if the owner is willing to pay 10% upfront.

Re: Insurance claim forms

loobylou — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:07:34 GMT

I hate filling out insurance claims

Have done 23 today, 20 last week and got another 12 waiting to be done tomorrow!! Getting an average of 80 a month. We dont charge but wish we did as it takes up so much time and the clients always complain that they are not filled out quick enough

Re: Insurance claim forms

Saskia Quinn — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:01:24 GMT

This is an interesting topic, I wasn't aware any practices charged for completing insurance forms. Though, a good idea I am sure. I am responsible for doing all of them at my practice, we don't get that many though this week alone, I have completed 6! We don't charge for doing them, I guess in most cases, we are happy the pet is insured, at least that way, we know our bill will be paid

Re: Insurance claim forms

nicky shoult — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:14:30 GMT

We currently dont charge but our out of hours cover charge £5 per claim.

Re: Insurance claim forms

Steph Worsley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:15:33 GMT

It has varied from practice to practice if we charge for it or not. at a couple ofpractices we used to charge £5 per claim form, the way we explained this to the client was that it took someone a long time and actually took them away from doing their normal job, the otheder practice we employed someone to do them specifically so this ppoint was put to the clients, normally theyy were happy to pay again someof the usual suspects would grumble and we would actually point out they would get plenty of money back anyway.

Re: Insurance claim forms

Royalsuper_fairy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:10:49 GMT

I'd love to charge to fill out claims, I seem to spend most of my time doing them or sorting out paperwork that no one else bothers to do. Resulting in me doing less and less nursing which isn't helping with portfiolo.

Re: Insurance claim forms

lskm 23 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:03:11 GMT

We just explain that they take time for the vet to fill out. It mainly started because we had clients wanting us go back years to try and get some money so having to go through years of history to pick out relavent bits takes time. Most clients are fine, the odd one has a winge but those that do are those who winge for having to pay a consult in the first place! The best comment I heard from one client was "I dont like to spend too much money on treatment because I dont want to have to get it back form the insurance company" I felt like saying well why do you have insurance if not going to use it! A client advised us recently that doctors will charge £75 for filling out an insurance claim, so she had no probs paying the £3

Re: Insurance claim forms

Rachel Jayne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:38:57 GMT

At my last practice, every vet (we had 8!) was allocated a nurse to fill out their insurance forms for them, sometimes you would have 6+ waiting in your folder for you to fill out.
It could quite easily take you all morning/afternoon to go through them all, but we never charged for filling them out. Lots of them were paid direct to us also.

At my current practice, we get about 2 or 3 a week & the vets tend to do them themselves (and whinge about it!) I sometimes grab an easy one & fill out all the routine bits & then leave them for the vet to sign.
Always used to sign them (unless specifically asked for vet) at my last place, cos most of them say "person authorised by vet", but they're not that fussed on that here!

The boss is thinking about charging for them, but is unsure what to charge...
I think it'll put people off. The whole point behind getting insurance is to avoid having to fork out lots of money.....so why add to it again?!

Re: Insurance claim forms

Kerry Spain — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:23:42 GMT

Interesting Laura, do you ever get clients complaining about the fee?

I've often thought about implementing a fee but I don't know how we could justify charging one. What is your explanation for the fee if anyone asks?

Re: Insurance claim forms

Shane — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:58:12 GMT

We dont charge. Wish sometimes I could charge and buy myself headache tablets with the money though.