Leveraging Source for Efficient Claims Audit and Inquiry

Health plans face complex and multifactored pricing and payment demands. With a robust and flexible platform like HealthEdge’s Source, plans can increase automation while working to optimize resource-intensive and manual processes like claims audits. This case study highlights one plan’s experience integrating Source with existing legacy technology and improving first-pass adjudication rates and efficiently managing claims audit and inquiry processes.

Challenges

HealthEdge® representatives recently talked to two members of the provider reimbursement team from a large non-profit health plan in the northeast. At the time of interview, the Plan was primarily using Source for pricing and reimbursement, leveraging the extensive library of pricing edits and bi-weekly updates that come standard with the Source platform. The conversation focused on two common and critical health plan challenges related to provider reimbursement. First, was the need for the Plan to replace an older tech platform while assuring the new platform would integrate with other legacy components of their tech stack. Second, was the need for the provider reimbursement team and other health plan system users to be able to audit claims and address ongoing retroactive claims inquiries from internal and external stakeholders.

Solution = HealthEdge Source

In 2021, the Plan began a phased implementation process, sunsetting an older payment and pricing platform and upgrading to Source. While Source is a modern payment integrity platform, the Plan was still working with a legacy core administration processing system (CAPS) and had concerns about platform integration especially given the significant complexity inherent in their hierarchical provider payment arrangements. Fortunately, Source has built-in integration with 10+ claims systems, ensuring that implementation wasn’t waylaid by key technology integration challenges. Source also offers hierarchical edit capabilities, enabling for example, the six different enterprise-level configurations overlaying mapping rules for 75 different rate configurations used just for one (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid; CMS) fee schedule at this particular health plan.

Not only was Source able to integrate with the Plan’s legacy CAPS system and accommodate complex hierarchical pricing configurations, but the integration and upgrade also led to a significant improvement in their first-pass claims adjudication rate. As noted by the Plan’s Reimbursement Initiatives Manager, prior to integrating their CAPS system with Source, their first-pass rate averaged about 80% and is now near 98% according to their CAPS measurement criteria. She noted that improvements are tied to both the Source product and the improved integration with their CAPS system, which has streamlined a variety of reimbursement processes.

“The overall end-to-end process was improved from the way it worked before, when we had to use robots, compared to how we’re using Source now… There are a lot of things we can do in Source now that we couldn’t do before.” – Health Plan Reimbursement Initiatives Manager

Retroactive claims inquiries and adjustments are another ongoing challenge for the Plan, particularly for providers who bill using a percentage of CMS fee schedules. CMS fee schedules are subject to ongoing policy updates and payment changes, but because only a small percentage of the Plan’s contracted providers use the CMS fee schedules, the Plan does not automatically make claims adjustments based on retroactive CMS change policies. Instead, issues usually come to their attention following a claims complaint or audit.

While the reimbursement team noted how helpful Source’s automated and bi-weekly updates are, they also noted that CMS release data gives limited information about when retroactive changes should impact reimbursement for specific types of providers. An example was when they received a complaint about 50 different claims payments across different hospital facilities that they contract with using the CMS fee schedules. In this situation, with multiple and dispersed claims issues, it was difficult to trace a payment change back to a specific CMS release.

The Reimbursement Initiatives Manager noted how critical Source’s audit feature is to address these types of provider complaints. It enables her to download relevant claims from the production to the pre-production environment and reprocess them, compare the two side-by-side, and identify changes like a capital payment amount or wage index change, that could drive such dispersed claims complaints.

“One of the best features of Source that I love is the ability to download a claim from one environment to another environment. That’s very handy.” – Health Plan Reimbursement Initiatives Manager

It is easy to see how this regional plan serves to benefit from this type of automation, and this addition may be a next step on their payment integrity journey. But Source is designed to support plans at all stages, and the audit feature (one of the Plan’s most widely used Source features) enables the Plan to meet their retroactive claims inquiries and audit needs manually. Source’s audit feature is critical for the Plan’s customer service team members who access claims detail to answer questions from providers and members, and for the audit team who hold claims audit responsibility. Further, the provider reimbursement team regularly uses the audit feature to respond to inquiries from Plan leaders.

For example, the Reimbursement Initiatives Manager was recently asked to explain to the Plan’s leadership team how ambulance services (a particularly expensive line-item for plans), are priced by CMS. It was easy for her to use Source’s audit feature to search for hospital outpatient provider type, filter by an ambulance code to narrow down the results, then find examples of claims that contained the ambulance code. With this information, she was able to provide a detailed response to Plan leadership about how CMS reimburses those ambulance services

Takeaways

• Pre-existing integration capabilities minimize challenges inherent in integrating new platforms with legacy tech stack components
• Optimizing automation will drive accuracy while minimizing resource-intensive and manual work and re-work for prospective and retroactive pricing changes
• Retroactive pricing updates aren’t going away; the right tool will enable plans to leverage robust audit features for inquiries and manual adjustments while considering more automated solutions
• Choosing an industry-specific tech partner like HealthEdge gives plans the support they need to optimize automation and accuracy despite the complexity of diverse pricing and provider arrangements

I have found the HealthEdge Source system to be very robust and flexible with regards to all of the different types of CMS and non-CMS based pricing methodologies that it offers.” – Health Plan Reimbursement Initiatives Manager