Cancelation Fee for NJ Health patient

[elainegutierrez21]

One of our providers wishes to charge a cancellation fee for a patient with Horizon NJ Health who has repeatedly cancelled their appointments at the last minute (as the provider was at the door for a home session). Since this is Horizon's Medicaid plan are we allowed to collect a cancellation fee? I checked the NJ Health manual but I don't see any information on this.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

 

[csperoni]

I am not aware of any state that allows a cancellation or no show fee for Medicaid patients (this includes managed Medicaid). I will note in my experience, most commercial plans do not prohibit this fee.
If you want to charge cancellation/no show fees, you should have a policy that the patient is aware of. Whether this is a posted sign, a letter sent to the patient, a mass e-mail to all patients, a message sent on your portal, part of your new patient forms, etc. Even if it were allowed, it would be very poor customer service to charge a patient a fee that they had no way of knowing about.

 

[elainegutierrez21]

I am not aware of any state that allows a cancellation or no show fee for Medicaid patients (this includes managed Medicaid). I will note in my experience, most commercial plans do not prohibit this fee.
If you want to charge cancellation/no show fees, you should have a policy that the patient is aware of. Whether this is a posted sign, a letter sent to the patient, a mass e-mail to all patients, a message sent on your portal, part of your new patient forms, etc. Even if it were allowed, it would be very poor customer service to charge a patient a fee that they had no way of knowing about.

Thank you so much for getting back to me. I appreciate the info.
I would have responded sooner but I couldn't find the post again!