6. Billing insurance and claims for the uninsured

Because government vaccine providers will not be receiving grant money for COVID vaccines, you will need to bill insurance on your residents’ behalf.

Here are some ways this can be done

• Use a registration tool. Some registration tools may be able to handle billing for you.

• Use your EMR: EMRs are often already integrated with an insurance billing tool. If you use your EMR as part of your registration process (either directly, or integrated with your patient registration tool), you can use your EMR to bill insurance.

• CVS export: If there’s no direct way to integrate between your registration tool and your billing tooL, you could do a CSV data export from your registration tool, then import that data to your insurance billing tool. This will require some manual work on your end.

• Manually bill insurance: The fallback solution is to manually bill insurance. This is time-consuming and error-prone, so we don’t recommend this route.

For the uninsured, you can submit claims to HRSA.

Keep in mind

• Do not bill uninsured residents: Insurance billing systems are often set up by default to automatically send bills to people who aren’t covered by insurance. Make sure this doesn’t happen for COVID vaccines, because everyone is guaranteed access to COVID vaccines regardless of their ability to pay.

• Be prepared to bill insurance twice: Depending on the insurance companies and the vaccine type, you may need to bill insurance twice, once for each dose of the vaccine.