Automatic Termination with Eligibility Sync

Automatic termination cancels an employee's membership when the employer's eligibility file says they have left, so the employer is never billed for coverage past the employee's term date. It also decides how long the patient chart stays active afterward, which is what makes continuity-of-care commitments possible without manual tracking.

This is the counterpart to automatic enrollment: one enrolls new hires, the other ends coverage when employment or benefits end. Both require Eligibility Sync to be set up for the employer. For how eligibility files are received and processed, see Eligibility Sync Overview.

Turning automatic termination on

Automatic termination is a per-employer setting, off by default, so you can automate some employers and keep others manual.

Go to Employers and select the employer.
On the Overview tab, find the Eligibility Sync section and click the edit button.
Turn on Automatic termination, set the grace period and chart inactivation, then save.

Changes take effect on the next file sync. While automatic termination is off, employees still appear in the Eligibility Sync table with their term dates, and you cancel memberships manually.

Grace period

The grace period keeps the membership active for a set number of days after the term date, up to 365. The default is 0, which cancels on the term date itself. Use it when the employer's contract keeps employees covered for a period after they leave. Billing continues through the grace period, since the membership is still active.

Inactivate chart

This decides when the patient chart moves to Inactive after the membership is canceled. It is on by default with a 30-day delay and accepts up to 90 days. A delay of 0 inactivates the chart at the same moment the membership is canceled. Turned off, the chart stays active indefinitely and you inactivate it yourself.

The delay is counted from the termination date, so a term date of March 1 with a 30-day delay inactivates the chart on March 31. This is what gives the care team a window to close out care after coverage ends.

What triggers a termination

The term date in the file is what triggers the termination. If the file has no term date, the benefit end date is used instead. The membership is canceled at 11:59 pm on that date, in the practice's time zone.

Future date — the cancelation is scheduled. The employee's row shows an upcoming termination indicator until then.
Date already passed — the membership is canceled as soon as the file is processed.
Grace period set — the cancelation date is the term date plus the grace period.

An employee who simply stops appearing in the file is not terminated. This is deliberate: an incomplete or late file would otherwise cancel a large number of memberships at once. Only a term date or a benefit end date ends a membership automatically.

Dependents

Terminating the employee also ends coverage for everyone on their membership. Dependents cannot be kept on a membership whose subscriber has been terminated, and there is no setting for this.

The reverse is not true. When the file gives a term date for a dependent only, that dependent is removed and the employee's membership continues with the remaining members.

Eligibility status and billing

At the end of the day of the term date or benefit end date, the employee's eligibility status changes from Eligible to Ineligible in the Eligibility Sync table. Before that date, the row carries an upcoming termination indicator, so you can see who is leaving without opening each record.

On the billing side, cancelation follows the normal rules: charges for cycles after the cancelation date are removed from the employer's draft invoice. When the plan bills in arrears, the partial cycle the employee actually used is still charged.

For members whose membership is managed by Hint, the termination is also carried into the Hint file, so the member stops appearing in later exports.

When a termination cannot be completed

A termination is skipped when removing the member would break the membership plan's required seat rules — for example, when a plan requires the subscriber seat to stay filled and the file terminates only that person while dependents remain.

In that case, practice admins receive an Error Processing Automatic Termination email naming the patient and the employer, with links to the patient's billing page and the Eligibility Sync tab. Resolve it by canceling the membership manually, or by adjusting the members on the plan first. These alerts follow the same notification preference as the daily eligibility sync summary, set in Team Management.

Changes after a termination is scheduled

The term date changes in a later file — the scheduled cancelation and the chart inactivation both move to the new date. A new date in the past cancels the membership immediately.
The term date is removed in a later file — the scheduled cancelation stays. Removing the date does not undo the termination.
You stop the cancelation manually — use Stop cancelation on the membership. Your decision stands, and a later file with the same term date will not re-schedule it. Only a genuinely newer term date overrides a manual action.

Daily summary email

The daily Eligibility Sync summary groups employees by employer under Not eligible as of today and Future terminations, alongside the enrollment sections. Employers with automatic termination turned on are marked (Automatic), so it is clear at a glance which terminations are handled for you and which ones still need manual action.