Getting a patient advocate can ensure that all your rights are protected. These healthcare professionals can point you in the right direction for specific treatments, maximizing your recovery chances. They also know a lot about insurance and will assist you in minimizing medical expenses while reducing the chance of getting scammed.
This kind of service isn’t covered by insurance, so you’ll have to set aside some money for it. Calculating expenses can be very tedious and complex, which is why we’ve decided to create this article to guide you during the hiring process.
Why You Need a Patient Advocate?
As mentioned, patient advocates can optimize your medical journey. They will get you in touch with the best providers in the city, inform you about different treatment options, and even help you select drugs.
Unfortunately, patient advocate service isn’t free. In the majority of cases, insurance doesn’t cover this kind of expense, so you’ll need to finance one of these professionals out of your own pocket. Nevertheless, getting assistance from an advocate usually warrants the expenses and might even save you some money.
“Paying for patient advocate actually goes in your favor,” claims GNANOW.org, a reputable healthcare provider. According to the company representatives, hiring a medical expert will ensure that you get a customized service according to your needs. By comparison, if the service was covered by insurance, an advocate would provide a certain number of work hours according to coverage.
Being limited by the number of hours is quite distressing, especially if you’re dealing with a life-threatening condition. You want to have the right medical expert in your corner who would govern the entire treatment procedure. Because of that, it’s no wonder that many people pay good money for this service.
4 Factors Determining Patient Advocate Cost
As usual, the biggest factors you need to consider are the reputation and marketing of a medical provider. Some companies charge ungodly sums for this kind of help, often deterring patients from hiring assistance in the first place. If we neglect individual price gouging, here are the four main factors determining the price of patient advocate service:
1. Service Complexity
Being a patient advocate isn’t easy. A medical provider should have extensive experience coming from numerous fields and procedures. Besides understanding common healthcare procedures, they should also know a lot common providers, drugs for specific treatments, insurance policies, and payment options.
In a way, a patient advocate needs to be a Jack of all trades, given that their clients can ask all sorts of things. Keep in mind that you’ll get charged for complex services separately, or you might get charged on a per-hour basis. So, we recommend that clients get their questions ready in advance to try to expedite the consultation process.
2. The Length of Cooperation
As these guys are mostly charging per hour, the price you’ll need to pay will be affected by the time you spend working together. Ideally, you should try to expedite the process as much as you can by focusing on priorities, but then again, you also shouldn’t be too hasty.
3. Geographic Location
There’s a big difference in how much you’d pay for a patient advocate in New York compared to Des Moines. As you could’ve guessed, larger urban locations will always be more expensive despite the fact they offer much more patient advocates.
4. Advocate’s Expertise
Expertise always comes with a premium. Advocates with numerous credentials, great education, and fantastic reviews will usually charge enormous sums for their services, especially if you live in a big city. However, depending on your particular case and needs, this price might be worth paying.
There are also cost differences depending on the advocate’s specialization. Those who know a lot about local providers and have direct contact with them can put you in a fast last for a hasty recovery. Similarly, advocates who know a lot about drugs can recommend an alternative therapy if the current one isn’t working.
You need to thoroughly examine a patient advocate’s expertise before negotiating. This will not only affect the price you need to pay but also the outcome. For example, if a medical expert has to learn about a specific procedure on the fly, this will eat away your time, which in critical cases might even lead to deadly outcomes.
How Much Does the Service Cost?
Given everything we’ve mentioned in the previous section and, specifically, all the variables, it’s hard to put a universal price tag for this service. The best thing we can tell you is that the cost will vary significantly based on your specific case but also the person you’ve hired.
If we were to generalize, a patient can charge you a little bit below $100 of their time, a price that can go all the way up to $300, $400, or even more. Still, this is a very rough calculation as we don’t know for how many hours you would employ one of these healthcare experts.
We also need to consider that while hourly rate is the most common method of calculating costs, you might also be charged in some other ways:
- Initial assessment
- Retainer
- Project fee
In most cases, a patient advocate will start by approximating the number of hours that a project will take to complete. They will provide you with a rough assessment based on that fee, which is similar to a quote you’d get from a moving company or a local roofer. Based on that assessment, you can decide whether or not to hire them.
You also need to remember that many advocates will ask for some money upfront. Once you spend this prepaid money, they will likely ask for another advance to keep them going. Depending on a patient advocate, they might charge you a fixed fee upon completion of a specific goal (for example, the end of the medical treatment).
Hopefully, these tricks will provide a solid basis for calculating patient advocate costs!
