Find medical bill errors

Find some of the best tips to follow for how to discover medical billing errors and to improve your understanding of medical and hospital bills.

• The first, and probably most important step to follow, is you need to ask for an itemized billing statement of all your charges. All hospitals, doctors, and other health- care providers will provide you with, upon request, an itemized hospital or medical bill that will detail the charges for all the individual procedures, tests, supplies, medications, and services.
   
• Closely review your medical bills for services, medications, or anything else that was never received. In other words, make sure that you received every treatment, service, and medication that you were billed for. Throughout the course of your hospital visit or medical service, you need to keep a log of your treatments received, or if you can’t do this, then ask a friend or family member to this while you are in the hospital.
   
• Be on the lookout for duplicate billing: Ensure you have not been charged twice for the same medical service, supply, or prescription drugs.
   
• An outside resource can help. For how to help decipher the coding on your medical bill, use you may want to use a third party website. Try www.online-medical-dictionary .org, which is a free medical dictionary. If you need information about a laboratory test or procedure and why it was needed, go to www.labtestsonline.org.

• Look into whether a medical bill advocate can help. They will review your bills and only charged you a percent of any savings they find. More.
   
• Another not so well known tip to find a medical billing error is to compare the explanation of benefits provided with the billing statements you received. Then be sure to cross-check the health insurance company's explanation of benefits statements with those itemized bills that you received from the doctors and hospital.
   
• Watch for upcoding on your bills, which is when sometimes charges on your medical bills can be inflated. This can occur when your doctor prescribes a generic prescription drug, but the medical bill has you paying for a more expensive, brand-name drug you didn't receive.
   
• As simple as this may sound, verify the dates of your hospital stay, as sometimes you can be charged for extra hours or days! You need to verify the dates of both your admission and discharge from the facility, and be sure you were not charged for the discharge day as most hospitals have it as their standard process that they will charge you for your admission day, but not the day you were discharged.
   
• Ensure you were not charged for canceled work. If your medical provider or doctor ordered for you, then subsequently canceled a service, or a test, or some other item that maybe you weren't able to get because you were too ill, or equipment failure, make sure you weren't charged for the canceled service.
   
• Look into whether a charity or other organization can help you with paying for medical bills or health care services. Some of these organization have assistance they can provide. Continue.
   
• Closely examine your operating and hospital room charges. For example, if you were in a semi-private hospital room, ensure you were not charged a higher price for a private room. Or maybe you did ask for a semi-private room but one wasn't available for you, so ensure you were not charged anyway for that private room. Also, make sure you weren't charged, or double billed, for more medication than anesthesiologist records show you received in the operating room, and ensure the same with other drugs in the  hospital room.