While factors like convenience (seeing a provider close to home), near-term availability, and positive reviews all play a role in deciding which provider to see, patients prize one characteristic over all others: Do they take my insurance?
With millions of patients searching for providers on Zocdoc every month, 97% of bookings are made using insurance. In order to maximize your visibility and increase bookings, make sure you are leveraging these insurance best practices:
1. Clearly list which insurance plans you accept wherever patients are looking, including on your website, directories, and of course, your Zocdoc profile.
Patients search for in-network providers on Zocdoc nearly three times more than they search for out-of-network providers. This means that providers are more likely to receive a booking if they are in-network with a patient’s insurance.
Search results that lead to bookings are the highest for in-network searches and nearly 7 times greater compared to out-of-network searches.
2. Accept as many of the top 10 insurance plans as possible to show up in more searches.
Having a greater number of insurance plans you accept directly translates to higher visibility and maximizes bookings. Providers on Zocdoc that are mapped to all of the top insurances showed up on page 1 in 95% more searches compared to providers missing 5 of the top insurances.
Half of Zocdoc bookings are with the top 5 insurance carriers and 60% are with the top 10 insurance carriers. You can work with a company like Zocdoc to determine your top insurance plans.
3. Spend the time to regularly audit and update your accepted insurance plans so the information is comprehensive and accurate. Insurance is a major decision factor for patients and accuracy matters!
There’s a negative correlation between missing top insurance plans and receiving bookings. Providers missing 5 of the top insurance plans receive 44% less bookings and providers missing 10+ receive 88% less bookings.
Bonus: One way to efficiently manage the complexity of keeping your insurance list up-to-date (#3) is by partnering with a company like Zocdoc, that has tools to help build and audit your insurance list.
With Zocdoc, instead of reviewing a complicated list of plan names, you can simply go to your Insurance Settings page and select the carriers and types of plans you are in-network with. Based on your selections, our system fills in a comprehensive list of plans from our insurance database (that includes over 18,000 plans), which are regularly audited to ensure completeness and accuracy. What’s more, there’s logic in place to avoid listing you as in-network with plans you can’t take due to factors like your location or specialty.
Ultimately, patients make the final decisions and they’re discerning. Understanding patient preferences and demographics as it relates to who books with commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare insurance can help with patient acquisition and retention. The good news is, regardless of which type of insurance a patient uses, they want to be loyal. Once they find providers who accept their insurance they want to keep coming back again and again, driving the most revenue for your practice.
Download our white paper today for more insights into insurance and how to grow your practice.