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In the EHR

Practice staff record a patient’s coverage in the Insurance, Payment & Membership section of the patient’s Demographics, where each policy carries its carrier and plan, the member and group identifiers, the subscriber’s relationship to the patient, and the dates the coverage is effective. These policies are what insurance billing draws on, and a patient can hold several at once. See Patient Demographics Guide - Insurance Management.

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Working with policies via the API

Writes are accepted for processing rather than applied before the response returns. A success on POST, PUT, or DELETE means the change has been accepted, and the stored policy is updated shortly afterwards. Read the policy back when you need to confirm the result, rather than relying on the response body to reflect what is stored. PUT on the collection creates as well as updates. An item that carries an id updates that policy; an item sent without one is created. Always send the id for a policy you intend to change — a missing or stale one doesn’t just add a duplicate, it sets off a chain reaction:
  • The policy you meant to update gets deactivated. If the rank already has an active policy, the id-less item is created as a second, separate policy at that rank, and the one that was already there is deactivated to make room for it.
  • Its card images are left behind. Card images stay attached to the policy record they were uploaded to, not to the patient or rank, so they don’t carry over to the new policy — they’ll look like they’ve disappeared even though nothing was deleted.
PUT on the collection with an empty array deactivates every policy on the patient. An empty request body is a meaningful instruction here rather than a no-op, so guard against sending one when a caller simply has nothing to update.

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Field notes

  • rank is the order in which a policy is billed, which the product calls primary, secondary, and tertiary insurance.