How do health care providers & office managers get patients' MBIs?

There are 3 ways you can get MBIs:

Ask your Medicare patients

Ask your Medicare patients for their Medicare cards when they come for care.

Use your MAC's secure portal

You can look up your patients’ MBIs through secure web interfaces that will support quick access to the MBI.

Our Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) mailed letters (here’s a sample (PDF)) to all Medicare Fee-For-Service providers to tell you how to use your MAC’s secure portal. You can use the portal to look up MBIs for your Medicare patients who don’t have their MBIs when they come for care. Using your MAC’s portal, you can look up any Medicare patient’s MBI, regardless of where the patient lives. Even if your patients are in a Medicare Advantage Plan, you can look up their MBIs to bill for things like indirect medical education.

You must have your patient’s first name, last name, date of birth and Social Security Number (SSN) to search. The SSN may differ from the HICN, which uses the SSN of the primary wage earner. If your Medicare patient doesn’t want to give the SSN, tell your patient to log into Medicare.gov to get the MBI.

Check the remittance advice

If you previously saw a patient and got a claim payment decision based on a claim submission with a HICN before January 1, 2020, look at that remittance advice. We returned the MBI on every remittance advice when a provider submitted a claim with a valid and active HICN through December 31, 2019.

 835 Loop 2100, Segment NM1 (Corrected Patient/Insured Name), Field NM109 (Identification Code)