Changes to Free-Typed Insurance Entry (Effective April 28, 2026)

Kipu is sunsetting the free-typed insurance option from Instance settings on April 28th, 2026. This change is part of broader updates made to the Lab partner experience and improvements to the billing process. However, it will also facilitate a smoother transition for integrated billing in the future and improve data reporting.

What Changes

The Facesheet Insurance Selection option “Allow free-typed insurances” in Settings > Instance > Payers will no longer be available and will be replaced with “Allow free-typed insurances and add them to the custom payors list”. (See more information about facesheet insurance selection options here.)

How will it affect me?

If you previously entered a patient’s insurance without selecting it from the auto-complete options, you will now be prompted to add such insurance to your custom payers list.

• If you select OK, this insurance will be added to your instance’s Payers list and saved on the patient’s chart. When you use the same insurance in the future, it will be available in the autocomplete drop-down.
• If you select Cancel, this insurance will not be saved as the patient’s insurance. You will need to either select a new payer from the autocomplete or add a new one to the future list.

We encourage everyone to use autocomplete when selecting the payor or create a curated list of the most common payers in Settings > Instance > Payers, which also allows additional configuration, such as pre-population of Plan Type, Payer Type, Phone, and Address.

Why are you making this change?

Selecting insurance from the database will minimize spelling and typing errors, allow pre-population of some fields, improve reporting, and connection to external systems (e.g., Labs).

I use CRM (Kipu CRM, Salesforce, other external systems) to create patients for the Kipu EMR. How does this affect me?

Your patient creation flow will not be affected. However, next time you will need to modify the patient’s payer, and it’s not from the autocomplete/custom payers, the system will prompt you to add this payer to the list.

I am using Integrated Billing (CMD, Kipu RCM). How does this affect me?

You are likely not affected. All our Integrated Billing customers are already using the curated Custom Payers List, so the change won’t affect them. If you’re planning to add Integrated Billing to your Kipu suite, this is a great opportunity to start prepping your Payers list.