HCFA1500 forms are the standard insurance form used by all insurance companies in the United States to process health insurance claims. It is part of HIPAA to standardize all health insurance billing. HCFA 1500 forms are red and white and can be purchased from many different vendors in several different forms.
If you are purchasing HCFA 1500 forms, we pay $34.20 per box of 2500 plus shipping when the quantity is less than 12500 for individual laser forms. The price is a little better if we order 6 or more boxes of 2500 per box. It costs us 1.6 cents per form.
Single or multiple copies can be purchased, continuous feed or laser printing, with or without barcode. The type you decide to purchase will depend on your type of printer and/or your need to keep a copy of the original form. For example, if you do not intend to keep a copy of the form and you have a laser printer, you will purchase single copy, single sheet forms.
If for some reason your office requires a copy of the HCFA form in addition to the original, you can purchase the two-part continuous feed forms and use a form feed printer, although these are pretty dated now. You can also easily print two claims, although this can be expensive if you’re doing it on a large scale.
Most practice management systems can print the HCFA1500 form along with the claim, but unless you have a color printer that prints the form red and the claim black, you may have trouble submitting the forms. Some insurance companies will not accept HCFAs that are not printed in red ink.
Just a fun side note here. Make sure you have a supply of forms on hand. You don’t want to run out. Once we ran out and had to take an old box of continuous forms feed, double copy forms tore them apart and ripped off all the edges to make them work on our laser printer. Not a fun task!
Different insurance companies require different blocks in the HCFA to be completed in a certain way. All medical billing software comes with the ability to print charges in the HCFA1500 format. For complete instructions on how to complete a HCFA 1500 form, click here.
You will use these forms each time you file a paper claim. You can submit all paper insurance claims or just sub-claims that require an attachment. Some insurance companies and no-fault companies are not set up to accept electronic transmissions and must be submitted on paper.
If you are using a clearinghouse, you can submit all your claims to them and they will, for a fee, convert your claims that cannot be submitted electronically to paper.
When shopping for HCFA 1500 forms, be sure to shop around. See your cost per copy.
Some companies also offer HCFA1500 window mailing envelopes, which eliminates the need for labels, which can be a huge time saver. We bought two sizes of window envelopes. Regular business size window envelopes allow us 12-14 claims and the large size can hold almost a pound of claims.