When the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, most people are counting down to a fresh start. But for many patients, that countdown comes with a different kind of anxiety: whether their insurance will still cover the medication they depend on come Jan. 1.

Each new year brings plan resets, coverage shifts, and formulary updates that can disrupt even the most consistent care journeys. And given that benefit verification volume can spike by a factor of 10x or more during reverification season, it’s critical to get right. Below, we’ve outlined a checklist for patient support leaders to help ensure your team enters the new year prepared, proactive, and patient-centered.

✅ Review the past year’s data for bottlenecks (e.g., days to approve, number of lost/changed coverages, number of denials) so you have an estimate of what to expect this time around.

✅ Ensure your patient database is clean and current by removing or archiving inactive patients and verifying key demographics (member ID, date of birth, etc.).

✅ Focus on task prioritization, and be sure to prioritize patients if they need to receive their therapy sooner than others in the queue.

✅ Do a dry run if possible, making sure your analytics dashboards are ready to go for planning, both same-day planning and across days and weeks.

✅ Plan for staffing around MLK day closures and extended payor hours to ensure you’re able to make the most of payors’ open hours, regardless of time or date.

✅ Don’t skip an eligibility check just because one was done within the last 30 days – things can, and often do, change with the start of the new year.

✅ Sync with your Infinitus account team to align on reverification timelines, status-report cadence, and escalation protocols – they’re happy to work with you to determine the best path forward.

✅ Make sure you’re up-to-date on this year’s ICD-10 code changes – if they’re outdated or invalid in a patient’s file, claims and benefit checks can be denied or delayed.

✅ If you’re still making manual phone calls, do a system load test to make sure that peak volume and traffic can be handled correctly from your telephony system (a.k.a. your phone lines), to your CRM, to your training or SOP reference platform.

✅ Plan for how your teams can balance reverifications with new patient enrollments/business-as-usual volume. Infinitus customers can work with your account managers to make sure you set the right expectations for case priorities.

✅ Remember to be a good payor partner! Payors are handling as much volume as they can with their newly hired seasonal staff, just like you may be. Focus on collecting the critical set of data elements you need to get patients on therapy, and train your teams on industry-specific terminology so you can ensure the data you get is accurate. (If you are an Infinitus customer, you’re already in good shape here – our agents always collect data digitally first before calling payors.)

✅ When all is said and done, make sure to update all patient data so that it’s current should you need to run any additional checks later in the year.

✅ If you’re not yet working with Infinitus, see what you’re missing out on by learning how one top biotech company handled a 144% surge in insurance renewal period needs with our agentic communications platform. 

Let AI take on insurance reverification

If the approach of the new year has you concerned about handling the annual eligibility refresh, it’s not too late to get help from Infinitus. Our agentic communications platform offers AI agents that call payors to complete benefit verifications – including waiting on hold and navigating IVRs – so you don’t have to.  

Reach out to our team today to learn more about how we can help you navigate reverification season.