Has your health plan ever processed claims for the month, only to be hit with a new regulation or a provider contract update? This frustrating cycle of retroactive changes is a consistent pain point for healthcare payers, causing delays, errors, and wasted time. Don’t make your team backtrack, re-evaluate claims, and scramble to adjust payments. HealthEdge Source™ offers a retroactive change management tool that ensures all adjustments are accurately tracked and implemented.
Leveraging Retroactive Change Management to Improve Payment Accuracy
Retroactive change management refers to the process of adjusting previously completed healthcare claims transactions to correct errors or reflect new information. For healthcare payers, this is essential for maintaining accuracy and compliance. HealthEdge Source solution incorporates retroactive change capabilities, helping healthcare payers to manage discrepancies and avoid financial losses.
The Costs of Making Retroactive Payment Changes
Throughout 2024 alone, experts anticipate over 600 changes to fee schedules, edits, and pricing logic. Updates to guidelines and regulations come from various sources, including:
- Regulatory bodies (e.g., Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) updates, Medicaid rate changes)
- Network contracts (e.g., modifications to provider agreements or payment policies)
- Internal configurations (e.g., changes in fee schedules or other system configurations)
Retroactive changes can impact a health plan’s bottom line in a few ways. Delays in enacting these changes may result in overpayments to providers, leading to financial losses. Conversely, underpayments can strain relationships with providers and pose administrative burdens for your team. Both overpayments and underpayments can damage your health plan’s reputation and expose you to potential regulatory penalties.
Implementing a solution with retroactive change management capabilities can help payers improve:
- Accuracy: Ensures all payment adjustments are accurate and compliant.
- Efficiency: Streamlines the process of managing retroactive changes.
- Compliance: Keeps up with regulatory requirements by applying necessary changes retroactively.
Shift from a Reactive to Proactive Strategy
Manually managing retroactive changes is a time-consuming and error-prone process that diverts valuable resources away from other important tasks. The volume and complexity of retroactive changes can be overwhelming for staff. But health plans can mitigate manual roadblocks with a proactive approach to reimbursement management.
Here at HealthEdge, we understand the financial burden retroactive changes create. Our solution aims to reduce overpayments and underpayments and ensure claims are paid correctly—the first time. With our Retroactive Change Manager (RCM) tool, your team can spend less time finding, chasing, and collecting what’s already gone out the door.
HealthEdge Source™ Retroactive Change Manager
Last year, HealthEdge Source launched the first phase of the Retroactive Change Manager. The tool helps healthcare payers automate core tasks, such as flagging claims that will be automatically eligible for reconciliation upon delivery. Scheduled reviews save valuable time that would have been spent on manual searching.
Additionally, RCM users receive regular variance reports that detail all the claims impacted by retroactive changes, along with the exact adjustments needed. This comprehensive approach gives health plans a clear picture of financial exposure and eliminates guesswork. This initial rollout laid the foundation for a more proactive approach to managing reimbursements, saving time and money, and avoiding potential payment issues.
Latest Enhancements to the Retroactive Change Manager
The latest enhancements to the Retroactive Change Manager go beyond regulatory updates. They empower health plans with a range of features designed to streamline workflows and maximize financial security.
With new targeted analyses and streamlined operations, healthcare payers can:
- View configuration updates within specific timeframes to focus analysis on impacted claims related to provider types or edits.
- Receive timely email notifications and enhanced claim summary reports for a clear understanding of adjustments needed.
- Enhance the user experience with increased performance and stability for smoother operations.
Leveraging the RCM directly translates to a healthier financial bottom line for health plans in three primary ways. First, it automatically recovers overpayments that might have been missed before. Second, faster and more accurate payments to providers lead to stronger relationships and fewer disputes—which can save time and administrative costs. Finally, the RCM keeps claims data organized and readily available, ensuring health plans are always audit-ready. This peace of mind allows payers to focus on strategic initiatives that drive organizational growth.
By shifting from a reactive to a proactive claims management approach, health plans can leverage a single system to identify and address retroactive changes. Imagine complete data sets analyzed automatically, underpayments identified and addressed proactively, and overpayments recovered internally. This not only saves time and money, but also fosters stronger provider relationships and ensures compliance. With fully incorporated industry changes and provider configurations healthcare payers can finally move from reactive adjustments to proactive control.
For more information about how your health plan can leverage retroactive change management, watch our on-demand webinar, “Optimizing Retroactive Configuration Changes”.
