Unclutterer Thread On Organizing Medical Bills

Unclutterer Thread On Organizing Medical Bills

Being in Canada I don’t really have this issue personally, but from what I understand, in the United States when you have to pay for medical services there is (and I believe this is the official term) a crapload of documents.

Over on Unclutterer there is an interesting (to me anyways) forum thread on organizing medical bills and papers.

Here is a portion of the question that started it all off:

Any suggestions for how to organize medical bills? How do you organize a “holding” area for the This-Is-Not-a-Bills? Then, once something is paid, do you attempt to separate it by family member? I’m thinking we should just have a small “Pending” box and then a big “Done” box.

Do you have any strategies for having to deal with the mess of medical forms that are in your life? I’d be interested to hear them either here in the comments or head on over to the Unclutterer thread and chime in.

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 2 comments

Ivan Oleksa - August 1, 2010 Reply

Wow I have read your article and by the way I found you website on Google and I think after I read somepost on you website especially this one I have my own opinion about what should I comment on the next meeting with my girl friend, maybe next week I will tell my familyabout this one and get debate.

Alex - July 30, 2010 Reply

I would simply tag the documents, and not worry about filing them specifically.

Eg: the "not-a-bill" document relating to Johnny's appendectomy would be tagged, "&john &appendix &appendectomy &not-a-bill &st-helen-hospital &simuran &singh" (Dr Simuran Singh at St Helen Hospital performed the procedure). Hopefully the date and other information about the actual procedure is in the document itself (because you've OCRed it, or because it was delivered to you as PDF).

Reconciling the two would simply be a matter of using desktop search (Spotlight in Mac OS X lingo) to find those documents (rather than rifling through the "insurance" and "medical" and "correspondence" files in the filing cabinet).

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