Recovery Audit Program (RAC)
Christina W. Furbert
Devry University
HIT230 Health Insurance and
Reimbursement
Professor Ingram
Table of Contents
What is RAC?..............................................................................................................................................................3
What type of audits will the RAC program cover?.....................................................................................................3
What could happen if it is discovered by RAC that health care organization may be committing fraud? Is there an appeal
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The goal of the RAC program is to identify improper payments made for claims for health care services of Medicare beneficiaries, identify and prevent fraud, abuse and waste of Medicare payments paid to health care providers under fee-for-service Medicare plans.(Georgia Medicaid RAC) In order to identify these issues RAC does a review process (audit) to detect these underlying issues.
What type of audits will the RAC program cover? The two types of review processes that the RAC program utilizes are the automated review and the complex review. The automated review requires no medical record; errors found during the automated review must be clearly noncovered services or incorrect application of coding rules and must be supported by Medicare policy, or approved by coding guidance.(Georgia Physician) The complex review requires a medical record, and may require a physician to submit medical documentation. In addition, records requiring a complex review are those with high probability of noncovered service or when on definitive Medicare policy, Medicare article, or Medicare sanctioned coding guideline exists.(Georgia Physician) RAC audits can review all aspects of the medical record including but not limited evaluation and management (E/M) services as related to those that should be reimbursed as a component of a global surgery package, as well as those on duplicate claims. By CMS regulations RACs are generally permitted to
HIM Personnel play an important role in the Medicare system. Medicare has transitioned from “fee for service” to providing incentive payments for providers that issue high quality care at affordable prices. In order to achieve the “pay-for-quality” incentives hospitals and health care officials must improve their documentation processes. “If it isn’t documented, it wasn’t done” is more important than ever. It is the responsibility of the HIM professional to ensure the integrity of the patient chart. HIM professionals monitor the quality of documentation and ensure all clinical documentation is complete and accurate. HIM professionals are the key to identifying process problems while keeping in mind patient safety, quality of care, and revenue integrity. Medicare requires that hospitals report quality improvement measures in order to receive payments; HIM professionals can directly impact Medicare incentive payments. HIM professionals are directly involved with the Medicare Audit Improvement Act. The HIM professional collects health data that is subject to the audits; HIM professionals are the point of contact for responding to Medicare audit requests.
The Recovery Audit Programs (RAC) is to identify any Medicare collection that is under any detection and collection of overpayments that are made on claims of health care services that are provided by Medicare beneficiaries, and to identify any payments that are provided so that CMS can take any actions that can prevent future improper payments in all 50 states. RAC programs is a successful program that utilizes the recovery Audit to identify ant Medicare overpayments and underpayments to health care provider to suppliers in selected states. The demonstration that has been ran between 2005 and 2008 has resulted in over $900 million in overpayments that has been returned to the Medicare Trust Fund and there has been $38 million in underpayments that has been returned to the health care providers. This has resulted in Congress to require the Secretary of the Department of health and Human Services to have a permanent and national Recovery Audit programs to help on overpayments that are associated with services for which payment are made under Medicare part A or B Which is the Social Security Act. For every Recovery Audit has a responsibly to identify any overpayments and underpayments that is within ¼ of the country.
9. The review of systems (ROS) is documented for patient care purposes and also factors into the ________________ for the patient 's visit.
"Medical coding professionals provide a key step in the medical billing process. Every time a patient receives professional health care in a physician’s office, hospital outpatient facility or ambulatory surgical center (ASC), the provider must document the services provided. The medical coder will abstract the information from the documentation, assign the appropriate codes, and create a claim to be paid, whether by a commercial payer, the patient, or CMS." (Aapccom, 2015) It is very important that billing coders have a full understanding of how to properly use medical codes to prevent denial of claims submitted.
On October 1, 2013 CMS has implemented a two midnight rule. If a patient is not in the hospital over two midnights the claim will not be eligible for payment under Medicare Part A (Pahuja, 2014). The physician must document and prove necessity for a two night stay. The American Hospital Association and three hospitals have sued Medicare based on ethical standards of RAC. The claim is that RAC auditors are paid based on the funds recovered from hospital audits. The push to pay auditors a flat fee, eliminating the unsubstantiated over riding of a physician decision in order to increase the amount of dollars
in order to obtain stronger or more persuasive evidence, the “bank balance” reported by the
| Our firm - Chiu & Weisserman LLP has been appointed as the new auditor of the public company Dollarama Inc. for the current fiscal year-end as at January 29, 2012. Please find in the following pages a report on the audit plan that was used to conduct our audit for the year ended January 29, 2012. Even though the audit of 2012 was performed by PWC, the assumption used for this project was that our firm was the new auditor for 2012.
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In the present day forensic accounting plays a huge role in many of the court cases publicized by the media. With the spotlight on the profession, this is a good opportunity to discuss the following topics:
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Moreover, this further supports our recommendation for Atlantic to proceed with this acquisition as it will obtain one of the best mills for a cheap initial cost ($319m compared to the construction cost of $750m).
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