Getting Paid

Before you start seeing patients it is a good idea to decide on how you want to be paid. The main ways practices are paid are 1) either by their patients paying cash and then claiming back from the medical aids, or 2) by you claiming from the medical aid directly.

Cash Practice

This means that your  patients will pay you cash for their treatments and then they will have to submit the claims to their medical aids. This is by far the simplest way to charge patients – but some (but not all) patients are unwilling to pay cash for services and prefer a service provider that claims directly from the medical aid.

Claiming from the medical aids

This means that you will claim for your treatments from the medical aid by either submitting a claim electronically or by manually sending in the claims to the medical aid. At this point you will need to decide if you want to pay someone to deal with the medical aids for you or if you want to buy or subscribe to software to do the claims electronically yourself.