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What is ERISA Claim Appeal Network?
Breaking News
Network Support for ERISA Claim Appeal Compliance ERISAclaim.com provides unique and unprecedented Network Support, as quality assurance and supplemental but ongoing support for health-care providers, who have participated our seminars and certification programs on health-care ERISA claims denials and appeals resolution services for healthcare providers, physicians, clinics and hospitals. While managed care reimbursement and health-care cost containment are out of control, and reimbursement crisis is worsening every year, health-care providers are hopeless in suffering from "breaking point" reimbursement deterioration after every efforts failed to stop managed care claim denial abuses. we provide ongoing educational programs and network support in assisting ERISA claim procedure compliance to prevent and fight back against improper claim denials and abuse. Network Support Service Plans
More than 70% of healthcare claims denied or delayed each year were not because of coding or billing errors or disputes, but due to non-coding and non-billing related reasons, such as policy exclusion, medical necessity/utilization reviews, pre-existing exclusions, pre-certification, prior-authorization, PPO bundling and downcoding and "unknown" or unexplained reasons. Yet all denials and delays were handled by coding and billing staffs, while up to 80% of healthcare claims are ERISA claims and these coding and billing staffs have no training and knowledge in ERISA, coverage dispute, appeal procedures. No one seems to know what to do, but do whatever they felt need to be done - going circles and frustrations every day.
Coding and billing are less than half of the successful reimbursement practice, coding and billing are not appealing and coverage dispute practice. Many coders and billers are wonderful, non-confrontational and very sophisticated individuals, but they might be terrible and counterproductive debaters, and less than ideal legal reasoning and logical thinkers. Many financial executives are hands-free managers in reimbursement divisions. The latest Harvard & RAND study for Congress and state legislative debate on Patients' Bills of Rights, conducted by David Studdert and Carole Roan Gresenz, study authors from the Harvard School of Public Health and RAND, funded by federal government, Department Of Labor, and Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, revealed that "little is publicly known about such appeals system", and concluded that "A majority of preservice appeals disputed choice of provider or contractual coverage issues, rather than medical necessity. Medical necessity disputes proliferate not around life-saving treatments but in areas of societal uncertainty about the legitimate boundaries of insurance coverage. Greater transparency about the coverage status of specific services, through more precise contractual language and consumer education about benefits limitations, may help to avoid a large proportion of disputes in managed care."
The updated Harvard & RAND study, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), published on June 18, 2003 through Health Affairs, examined the outcomes of nearly a half-million coverage requests in two large medical groups that contract with health plans to deliver care and conduct utilization review, and discovered the urgency and necessity of expertise of ERISA claim procedure specialists. The study concludes the following in its summary and policy implications: "....We found much higher denial rates than those previously reported.....Denials made on contractual grounds—the largest share of denials—may call for both clinical and contractual expertise. Hence, they should ideally be made by personnel who are versant in both areas. There was some evidence of this sort of dual expertise being brought to bear on coverage decisions at the two groups we studied."
"......In this environment, contractual coverage and medical-necessity issues that persist are likely to be for services that enrollees feel especially strongly about. Such consumer concerns, together with ongoing consumer protection agendas that include reforms such as guaranteed external review and right-to-sue provisions, mean that the policy importance of UR denials in managed care is unlikely to wane in the foreseeable future." A JAMA Editorial commenting this study further supported the conclusion of this study and advanced the right solutions more precisely at New ERISA Claim Regulations: "Regulations issued by the Clinton administration in 2000 were designed to infuse rigor into the appeals process maintained by employer-sponsored health plans covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA),10 which governs insurance arrangements for more than 150 million workers and their family members. Whether these rules will be vigorously enforced remains to be seen." However these best experts "hired" by Congress and federal government are one step away from the complete discovery and solution. Let us fill in the missing links and connect dots in order to save our health-care system from collapsing and crisis. First, we identify the controlling force and power in contractual policy coverage denial. The majority of Americans are covered under the employer-sponsored health-care programs in private sectors under ERISA, 80% of the claims and 60% of health expenditures are regulated under ERISA. Each individual ERISA plan offers different coverage and benefits, either self-insured or fully-insured through purchase of insurance from an insurance company. The controlling and governing document for each ERISA plan is Summary Plan Description (SPD), the rule of the game for interpreting each SPD and resolving the disputes on contractual denials is ERISA claims procedure regulations. Therefore the experts from Harvard & Rand study group discovered the importance and necessity of "contractual expertise" but aborted the solution of "contractual expertise" due to "the reasons of size or financial stress, this may be beyond the reach of smaller medical groups that have assumed responsibility for UR".
Financial burden and unavailability of this contractual expertise could be
the final resolution to their study group to determine if those contractual
denials were made by the plan or TPA correctly. Another new Rand/Harvard study published on February 2004 issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, "Disputes over coverage of emergency department services: A study of two health maintenance organizations" discovered that 90% of denial in utilization reviews were overturned on appeals, from a stratified random sample of approximately 3,500 appeals of coverage denials lodged by privately insured enrollees between 1998 and 2000 at 2 of the nation's largest HMOs. This study concludes: "The prevalence of ED cases among all appeals reflects disagreement between lay and expert judgments about what constitutes emergency care under the prudent layperson standard. The high rate at which enrollees win these appeals highlights significant disagreement in interpretation of the standard among different adjudicators within managed care organizations (medical groups and health plans). When enrollees fail to challenge denials that would be reversed on appeal, they bear the financial brunt of ambiguities in interpretation of the prudent layperson standard." This new Rand/Harvard study warns that "Although the end result for consumers is the same in each of these cases, the messages sent by plans to consumers and medical groups are not. Goodwill payments imply inappropriate use of the ED (notwithstanding the fact that actual merit might not have been assessed). Merit-based overturns, on the other hand, signal an error in utilization review and instruct medical groups about the proper limits of coverage, instructions that medical groups cannot ignore because they must meet the cost of these claims. Hence, merit-based overturns perform a valuable signaling function, akin to the role of judicial precedent in the law. Unless plans invest additional effort in educating utilization reviewers about erroneous decisions for which they are not held financially accountable, goodwill payments of potentially meritorious cases lim | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
