Ways to Organize Medical Bills During Cancer

After receiving a diagnosis of cancer, having to manage medical bills can be a challenging task. However, reading through these bills carefully and using tools like tracker spreadsheets can be helpful along the way.

As patients with cancer receive medical bills — via mail or email — it’s important to understand that mistakes could be present.

“It’s definitely a human process,” explained Joanna Doran, CEO of Triage Cancer, during an interview with CURE®. “We type things into a computer and we definitely have typos. So step one is making sure that as you’re organizing your bills, that you’re actually checking them to make sure they’re correct.”

Doran, also a member of CURE®’s advisory board, noted that matching up the explanation of benefits (EOB) with the medical bills is key. If these two documents do not match, she said it’s necessary to either ask providers for clarification or go directly to patients’ insurance companies.

“You don’t want to be in a situation where you end up paying the provider maybe more than you need to because the bill’s not correct until you actually see how the insurance company is handling it,” Doran explained.

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Using medical bill tracking, such as a spreadsheet provided by Triage Cancer, can also be a helpful tool when organizing bills. This tracker can help patients and caregivers identify out-of-pocket maximums and can determine when patients have reached them.

“That’s really helpful because if you meet your out-of-pocket maximum, then your insurance should be paying at 100% for your medical care for the rest of the year,” Doran said. “So you then know at that point, every time you go to a provider and they ask for your copays that you want to make sure you’re communicating that you’ve already met your out-of-pocket maximum and don’t have to pay any more copays for the rest of the year.”

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: How to Keep Medical Bills Organized During Cancer

Transcript:

We definitely hit on a key topic: staying organized when managing medical bills is definitely step one. Unfortunately, anytime you're getting medical care, it can generate a lot of paper, and that might mean actual paper that is getting mailed to you, but it also might be emails that you're getting for bills and explanation of benefits from your insurance companies. It might also be things that you're getting through an online portal from your provider or your insurance company.

So whatever form it might take, it generates paper, and that paper is really important to review and make sure that it's correct because it is possible that there might be mistakes in medical bills. It's definitely a human process. We type things into a computer and we definitely have typos. Step one is making sure that as you're organizing your bills, you're actually checking them to make sure that they're correct. Step two is also to make sure that you're not ignoring those explanation of benefits that you get from your insurance company and an explanation of benefits, or an EOB, is basically a piece of paper where the insurance company is explaining [that] they got a bill from the provider, how they handled the bill and then what your responsibility is. So you want to take that explanation of benefits from your insurance company, match it up to the bill that you get from the provider and make sure it actually is the same, and that what you're getting billed for is, in fact, what the insurance company says you should be getting billed for, and what your responsibility is.

If for any reason, they don't match up, then you need to start to ask questions, so whether it's going back to your provider and getting clarification or going to your insurance company and asking questions about the EOB. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you end up paying the provider maybe more than you need to because the bill's not correct until you actually see how the insurance company is handling it. Because if it's wrong, then you're going to have to go back and try to get your money back from the provider, and you don't want to have to create more work for yourself. So doing a little bit of work on the front end and comparing the bill to the explanation of benefits and waiting until the EOB comes in the mail or by email or through the portal, and then making that comparison is also very helpful.

Transcript was edited for clarity and conciseness.

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