How to Give Patients Accurate Cost Estimates Before Their Visit
Aug 21, 2026
Earlier this week, I shared three things five-star practices do differently:
They set expectations early.
They communicate consistently.
They train for difficult moments before they happen.
Then Dr. Jim McDonald left a comment that stopped me:
“A five-star review is the receipt, not the experience.”
That’s such a good way to put it.
The five-star experience isn’t created when someone clicks five stars on Google.
It’s created in hundreds of little moments that happen long before that.
And one of those moments happens when a patient looks at your front desk and asks:
“What do I owe today?”
What happens next?
Does your team know where to look?
Or does someone start clicking through screens, looking for a spreadsheet, asking another employee, or calling for the manager?
It may seem like a small thing.
But I promise you, the patient notices.
Your front desk shouldn’t have to guess
Every insurance company has its own contracted rates.
The allowable for the same CPT code can be different depending on whether the patient has Medicare, BCBS, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, or another plan.
Your front desk doesn’t need to memorize all of that.
But they do need an easy way to find it.
Especially for the services your practice performs over and over again.
If they don’t have that information at their fingertips, that’s not necessarily a training problem.
It’s a systems problem.
And that’s good news, because you can fix a system.
Start with ONE payer
Don’t try to tackle every fee schedule in your practice at once.
Pick one of your highest-volume payers.
Then pull the contracted allowable amounts for the CPT codes you use most often.
Start with 5 or 10.
Your common office visits. Your most common procedures. The things your team sees every single day.
Then ask yourself:
Could the person sitting at my front desk find this information in less than 30 seconds?
If the answer is no, that’s where I’d start.
Not with another staff meeting.
Not with another reminder to “collect more at the time of service.”
Fix the system.
Then connect the dots
Knowing the allowable amount is only one piece of the puzzle.
Your team still needs current eligibility and benefit information to understand the patient’s copay, deductible, and coinsurance.
And sometimes you simply can’t know the patient’s exact responsibility until the claim is processed.
That’s okay.
The goal isn’t to promise a number you can’t guarantee.
The goal is to give your team enough information to have a confident, informed conversation with the patient.
They might say:
“Based on the benefits we verified today, your estimated responsibility is $____. Your insurance company will make the final determination when they process the claim.”
Clear.
Honest.
No guessing.
And think about what that does for the patient.
You’ve set expectations early.
You’ve communicated clearly.
And you’ve prepared your team for a conversation that can easily become frustrating when they don’t have the information they need.
Sound familiar?
Those are the things five-star practices do differently.
Go watch one checkout
Here’s my challenge for you this week.
Spend 30 minutes near check-in or check-out and watch what happens.
You’re not evaluating your employees.
You’re evaluating your system.
When someone asks, “What do I owe today?” pay attention to what has to happen before your team can answer.
How many screens do they open?
Do they have to ask someone else?
Do they leave the desk?
Do they call the billing department?
Do they come looking for you?
Every unnecessary step is telling you something.
Your front desk shouldn’t have to go on a scavenger hunt to answer one of the most common questions patients ask.
And your patient shouldn’t have to feel the chaos happening behind the scenes.
That’s what becoming a five-star practice is really about.
It’s not chasing five-star Google reviews.
It’s creating five-star moments, over and over again, in the ordinary interactions that happen inside your practice every day.
The Google review?
That’s the receipt.
