How do I add a new patient?

Go to Patients in the left menu and click Add a patient.

Read the form before you type. A medical record number is filled in for you, and you rarely need to change it. Then the name in three boxes, the date of birth, the gender, the address, and an optional social security number.

The one rule that matters: enter the identity exactly as the insurance company knows it. Not the nickname, not the married name if the card says otherwise. The payer matches on these fields, and a mismatch is a rejection.

Then add the insurance card. You can snap a photo of the front of the card and let the system read the payer and member ID off it, or enter it by hand. By default the patient is treated as the policyholder, so the form stays short. If the patient is a dependent on somebody else’s plan, tick the box and the policyholder fields appear.

Then check the coverage, before the visit if you can. See Eligibility and prior authorization: what is the difference?.

There is a faster path too. Tell the assistant who walked in, in one sentence. It reads the details back to you and asks you to confirm before it creates anything. See Can I just ask the assistant to create a claim?.