Eligibility checked 5 days before the visit, not the night before.

You need the patient's Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI), the 11-character ID on their Medicare card. With it, you can check through a payer portal (10–15 minutes of staff time), by phone, or through a real-time eligibility check that returns in seconds. A real-time check against Medicare's payer ID, CMS, confirms Part A and B status, deductible remaining, QMB status, and any Medicare Advantage enrollment. Medman runs these checks automatically for every scheduled patient, from $0.50 each.

Medicare's payer ID for eligibility checks is CMS. A check to that ID requires the patient's MBI and returns Part A and B status, deductible remaining, and whether the patient is enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. If the response shows an MA plan, bill the MA plan — not Original Medicare. That mix-up is one of the most common preventable denials. Payer IDs for other plans are in Medman's payer directory.

Manually, 10–15 minutes per patient: log into the payer portal, find the member, read the benefits, update your PM system. An automated real-time check returns in seconds. That difference is why Valley Diabetes & Obesity went from 50 hours of verification work a month to 7 — the agent checks every scheduled patient 5 days before the visit, and staff only touch the exceptions.

Most practices check the day before because doing it right takes hours. By then there is no time to fix what the check finds. Medman checks 5 days before the visit, so wrong insurance, expired coverage, an out-of-network plan or a patient assigned to another PCP surfaces with days to spare. Your staff can get the correct insurance on file, or cancel the appointment and offer the slot to someone else. The result also shows the copay, the deductible and the out-of-pocket max, with how much is left on each, so the front desk collects the right amount at the visit.

Yes. Five days is the starting point; your practice can set the window further out. Your staff can also run a check on demand at any time, including while a new patient is on the phone or when an existing patient calls with new insurance, so the coverage is confirmed before the call ends.

Start with your state's Medicaid program — each state runs its own provider portal, and the process varies by state. Because Medicaid coverage can change month to month, verify close to the date of service rather than at scheduling. An automated check does this without portal logins: Medman verifies state Medicaid plans in seconds, every day, for every patient on the schedule, and flags anyone whose coverage has lapsed before they reach the front desk. Staff can re-run a check on demand closer to the visit.

A manual check costs about $8.57 in staff time, per the CAQH Index benchmark — the portal is free, the 10–15 minutes aren't. An automated check with Medman starts at $0.50. At 30 patients a day, that's the difference between roughly $250 a day in staff time and $15 in checks.

Medman's eligibility network covers 3,662 payers, and 1,300+ of them — including Medicare (CMS), state Medicaid plans, and the major commercial carriers — return real-time checks in seconds. Many payers still do not support electronic eligibility at all, which is where automation usually stalls. For those, Medman signs in to the payer's portal with your practice's own login and verifies the same way your staff would.

Medman reads the schedule from and writes results back to AdvancedMD, DrChrono, Tebra, Practice Fusion, athenahealth, ModMed and eClinicalWorks today. If yours is not on the list, tell us on the call; new EHRs connect on request.

You send us one day of scheduled patients with their insurance details, after we sign a Business Associate Agreement. We run the checks and walk you through the results on a 30-minute call: who was inactive, whose plan had changed, who was out of network or assigned to another PCP. There is nothing to install and no commitment.