(Spirit Lake)– A local hospital is making a tool available that will help patients estimate their bill for services. Jennifer Gustafson of Lakes Regional Healthcare tells KUOO news they recently added an “Estimate My Bill” feature to their website…
“We’ve had over the years people call in and say can you tell me how much it will probably cost if I, you know, had my baby there, or something like that, and, you know, we will provide estimates in those situations but we now have something that is pretty automated and probably a lot more accurate because we take the person’s health insurance into consideration with including how much they owe, the deductible and all of that. So we’re pretty excited about this.”
Gustafson says you will need to have several pieces of information ready prior to using the tool…
“It will ask for your insurance company, your group plan number, insurance policy I.D. and of course your name and date of birth. And so then they can take all of that information and they tie that basically up to our system and what our arrangements are with all the different insurers to understand how much they’ll have to pay out of pocket.”
Gustafson adds that since the tool has just been recently developed, there are some services for which estimates are not available…
“We have a lot of services listed, however, you know, we do a lot of things here at the hospital so a lot of the services still aren’t on there but we hope to have many more services and procedures listed as the tool is further developed. But one thing to also keep in mind is that when you have a healthcare service a lot of times you don’t just receive bills from the hospital, Lakes Regional Healthcare. There are other organizations or other healthcare providers that also provide care but they’re not necessarily through us. So we might have professional fees, or something like anesthesia charges that would be a separate billing. Those would be from like doctors, like radiologists for example, and so we can’t tell you about that part of it.”
You can find the tool and more information at lakeshealth-dot-org and by going to the “patients” tab. Scroll down to “estimate my bill”.
