Jenni Nolan found a calling in helping people resolve medical billing issues after tackling them herself and on behalf of others. So, she became a board-certified patient advocate in the fall of 2019.
She started Clear Healthcare Advocacy in Carmel in 2020.
“I help overwhelmed patients nationwide resolve issues with their medical bills and health insurance claims so they can rest assured that what they’re paying for health care services is correct,” she said. “I spend my time reviewing medical bills and insurance (explanation of benefits), having claims reprocessed, submitting appeals for denied services, negotiating balances on behalf of my clients. I love my work.”
Nolan previously worked in physician office management, first for obstetricians/gynecologists and then for a counseling center.
“It’s through this work that I became very familiar with the health care billing process, identifying medical billing and claims processing errors, and getting those errors resolved so that my providers were being paid correctly and patients were being billed correctly,” Nolan said. “This work opened my eyes to just how complicated the healthcare billing process is, how many opportunities for errors there are, and how it’s impossible for patients to navigate on their own.”
The Carmel resident said she began to notice that at least one-third of the medical bills that come into my own home are incorrect.
“Fortunately, I’m able to quickly identify those errors and get them resolved before paying the bills, but I’d say to my husband, ‘If I weren’t here to catch these errors and get them fixed, you’d just be blindly paying the bills – and I’d be rolling in my grave,’” Nolan said. “My husband hates to owe money and knows nothing about the medical billing process, so he, like many people, would be paying bills for amounts he didn’t owe.”
Nolan said there are those who receive erroneous bills and cannot afford to pay them.
“So, they end up being sent to collections, having their credit negatively impacted or being sued by their healthcare providers,” she said. “I simply couldn’t sit with the fact that there were folks out there dealing with this stuff with no idea how to navigate the system, and I knew that I could help.”
Nolan said she reviews the medical bills/health insurance claims for errors and advises the clients when a bill is OK to pay versus when there are issues that need to be resolved.
“I’m also able to offer guidance on health plan options and understanding one’s health insurance plan,” she said. “Usually, patients reach out to me when they’ve received a bill that is higher than they were expecting. Often, those bills have already been sent to collections, but it’s not too late to have them corrected if they’re wrong.”
For more, visit clearhealthcareadvocacy.com.
