Certified Medical Administrative Assistants (CMAA) Practice Exam 2025 – Comprehensive All-In-One Guide to Exam Success!

When a patient allows a healthcare provider to receive direct payments from an insurer, this is known as the assignment of benefits. This term refers specifically to the patient assigning their insurance benefits directly to the provider, which authorizes the insurer to pay the provider rather than the patient.

This practice streamlines the payment process, as it eliminates the need for the patient to pay upfront and then wait for reimbursement from the insurer. It also ensures that the provider receives payment directly for the services rendered, simplifying financial transactions in the healthcare setting.

Understanding this concept is essential, as it is a common practice in healthcare finance, impacting billing procedures and patient-provider relationships. The other options do not accurately describe this specific arrangement: insurance assignment might imply transferring responsibilities among insurers, payment authentication generally refers to verifying the legitimacy of transactions, and authorization for services pertains to the approval for specific treatments or procedures rather than the payment process.