Chris Kresser: We’ve always had patient pay for labs up front, and it’s not something that requires MD HQ to be able to do. I’ve used a variety of EHRs in the past, and none of those had billing modules because they were kind of the early days of EHR. We used QuickBooks Online for billing, so we would just generate an invoice with QuickBooks Online and send that to the patient, and they would pay that invoice after the initial consult. That included the initial consult price or fee, and then it also included the fee for the labs, so then they had paid for the labs and then they would do the labs. I do tend to agree that when patients pay for the labs that way, they’re probably more likely to get them done.
Marcie asked, “Do you do the billing for them, too?” I’m not sure what you mean by “billing.” If you mean insurance billing, we don’t do insurance billing. We do provide patients with superbills to submit to their insurance companies. For blood tests, it depends on their insurance. If they have insurance where they think they can order the blood work, we’ll order it through LabCorp or Quest. But if their insurance won’t cover it or they’re on a high-deductible plan or something, then what will happen is we’ll use Professional Co-op and that will make it more affordable than if they had to pay LabCorp out of pocket.
In the blood chemistry unit, I’m going to teach you more about Professional Co-op, and I’m going to actually have a comparison of insurance prices that people paid when their insurance did cover the tests through LabCorp or Quest versus using Professional Co-op. Surprisingly, sometimes using Professional Co-op is even cheaper than what a patient pays through their very good insurance, so there may be some cases where using Professional Co-op makes sense even when the patient has insurance.