Medical Insurance
Chicago Dizziness and Hearing is a customer service organization.
We are mainly paid for our work through health
insurance. We also see occasional patients who pay "out of pocket", or who have their
evaluations paid for as part of a legal or quasi-legal process (IMEs below).
Our most common insurance provider is Blue Cross/Blue
Shield of Illinois. After this, it is Medicare. We ask "self-pay" patients to pay at the time of service. Self-pay charges are set at the usual and customary
level for Chicago Illinois. Insurances that we are not contracted with, including most HMO's are treated as "self-pay". Self-pay status is also used for patients carryiing insurances that have historically never paid CDH for its work. We will provide you an invoice to submit to your insurance. We accept most credit cards.
If you have questions about our billing, please call us and ask for the billing
department, or email billing@dizzy-doc.com
Billing company changes (11/2012).
CDH changed from using an external billing company called "KLO" to internal billing on 9/2012. The "wind down" was very challenging, and we are still sorting things out. Please bear with us as we work things through. We have not had any issues with the new internal billing system.
Managed care
We have contracts with some managed care companies through our contracting organization (NHC - Northwestern
Health Care). These are in general the same providers that are contracted by the community of doctors that
work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and affiliated institutions. The following is a list of providers
as of September 2008. Please check with your carrier to be sure.
PLAN
We are not contracted with Firsthealth, HFN, Humana HMO, and PPONEXT W/C.
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Independent medical examinations (IME)
These types of visits are not patient care, but rather are generally "second opinion"
visits requested by insurance carriers or legal entities. We have a set fee for these procedures.
IMEs are arranged through our billing office
(billing@dizzy-doc.com).
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Special tests not covered by some insurances
While nearly everything that we do is covered by most health insurances, there are a few tests that we offer
in CDH that are not covered by all insurances. For instance,
Computerized Dynamic Posturography (CDP) is covered by Medicare, but not covered by either
Cigna or Blue Cross Blue Shield. Tilt-table testing has a wildly different set of requirements for coverage across insurers. Often we simply do not know whether we will be paid for our work.
For CDP tests, in persons not covered by Medicare, following the recommendation of insurance carriers, we require a signed
agreement for payment for testing by the patient, should insurance not cover the bill, before proceeding.
This is called an "ABN" form. For persons whose insurance does not pay for posturography,
the procedure becomes a "self-pay" test.
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