Question 4: How Does Your EDI Partner Reduce the Burden of Claims Submission for Providers?
Plan members want access to a range of high- quality providers. Without a robust provider network, health plans are challenged to grow membership and differentiate themselves from competitors.
The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) 2022 Index reported that providers spend ten minutes submitting a single electronic claim on average. For paper, it’s 22 minutes. A large part of this is repetitive data entry. These time blocks add up to significant resource drains in a typical day. Alleviating stressors will reduce payer-provider friction and promote cooperation in your common goal to improve health outcomes for members.
With the right EDI partner, you can streamline operations, reduce administrative burden, and improve your organization’s bottom line. Embracing new technologies and cooperative partnerships can help you gain a competitive advantage and, ultimately, provide better care to members.
Our fourth and final question leads you to ask yourself: “Is my EDI partner providing holistic support to my partner’s and my own organization’s operations?”
Ready to jump to all four questions? Want to see how your EDI partner stacks up? Download our white paper here.
How Does Your EDI Partner Reduce the Burden of Claims Submission for Providers?
Plan members want access to a range of high- quality providers. Without a robust provider network, health plans are challenged to grow membership and differentiate themselves from competitors.
The healthcare industry is becoming more consumer-driven and labor shortages continue to mount. Health plans need to be mindful of provider relationships and the administrative burdens your claims processing may be placing on them.
The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) 2022 Index reported that providers spend ten minutes submitting a single electronic claim on average. For paper, it’s 22 minutes. A large part of this is repetitive data entry. These time blocks add up to significant resource drains in a typical day. Alleviating stressors will reduce payer-provider friction and promote cooperation in your common goal to improve health outcomes for members.
Your healthcare EDI partner should help you to help providers with an affordable billing tool. Our solution, MYUHIN, reduces repetitive data-entry, and solidifies coding and submissions data to satisfy your processing requirements. Providers can use MYUHIN to submit claims, check patient eligibility, and search, view, and download payment information from any computer, any where.
UHIN is a national EDI network built in 1993 by health plans. We partner with payers and providers across the US. Our approach to EDI and customer service is different. If you’re interest in learning more, please contact us today.
Question 3: Are Providers Frequently Contacting You With Questions About Their Claims?
Health plans constantly seek to optimize their high-performing provider networks which provide value to members and patients. To grow these important networks, payers should nurture their provider relationships through personal attention and cutting edge technology.
This is particularly important at a time of mounting staffing shortages and rhetoric of economic downturns. Additionally, medical claim volume increased by 28% in 2022 as vaccines became available, medical offices reopened and pandemic regulations softened. When you add this up, the need for administrative simplification becomes more obvious for health plans and providers.
Tracking down claims, managing denials and submitting myriad claims can burden staff, compound labor costs and decrease profitability. When your provider network is stressed then your ability to grow as a carrier is impacted. Your EDI partner should automate workflows and manage your trading partner network so your support staff can focus on more strategic priorities, rather than answering phone calls and emails all day long.
Our third question addresses this concern as you ask yourself, “how does my EDI partner stack up?”
Ready to jump to all four questions? Want to see how your EDI partner stacks up? Download our white paper here.
Are Providers Frequently Contacting You With Questions About Their Claims?
When resources are tied up managing claim inquiries, you’re likely underperforming your peers and weakening your organization.
An inability to provide visibility to track and troubleshoot claims in a timely fashion can create financial implications. The increased demand on staff can decrease productivity, which could further delay payments and lead to staff burnout and turnover. Payers must respond to providers within a regulated timeframe, and providers rely on prompt payment for cashflows and their own business growth. Further dissatisfaction amongst providers and members can upend the collaborative nature of interoperability and could drive providers and members away to different plans.
The volume of inquiries to track down claims can burden staff and compound labor costs through the need to hire additional people. The situation can foster negativity between providers and operators, reducing satisfaction for both groups. Your EDI partner should work with you to increase your ability to automate claims processing. Part of this is facilitating a simple, electronic process for providers to submit their transactions and understand the status along the way.
UHIN is a national EDI network built in 1993 by health plans. We partner with payers and providers across the US. Our approach to EDI and customer service is different. If you’re interest in learning more, please contact us today.
Provider enrollment is crucial for health plans to ensure that members have access to a full range of services. Credentialing verifies a clinician’s training and licensing. Enrollment establishes the technical connection between the provider and the plan. The processes can be complex and time-consuming, but partnering with dedicated enrollment experts – like UHIN – can help streamline the onboarding experience and accelerate success in a highly competitive marketplace.
Why Enrollment Matters
Health plans are constantly looking for better ways to serve the insured, from developing innovative wellness benefits to making it easier to access high-quality, affordable care in the community.
Provider network development is a huge component of this quest for continuous improvement. Contracting with the right mix of providers – and enough of them – ensures that members can get a full range of services within an acceptable time frame.
Building this ecosystem isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to the nuts and bolts of bringing clinicians on board. Provider credentialing and provider enrollment are equally critical, yet they can often cause confusion and problems on both sides of the plan-provider relationship.
In fact, providers not being registered/credentialed with a payer is the #1 reason for denials. The #2 reason for denials: the provider did not complete the payer-required process for enrollment.
Both steps – credentialing and enrollment – are crucial. However, even the fundamental differences between the two activities aren’t always clear, especially because they bump up against each other during onboarding. It’s important to understand what’s involved in each process, how they work, and why finding the right partner matters so much to health plans as they grow and mature.
What is Provider Credentialing?
Provider credentialing is the act of verifying that a clinician has the correct training and licensing to practice in their area of expertise. It’s similar to an extensive background check. The process starts after a provider submits a request to work with a practice, health system, or health plan. Collecting this extensive dataset can take up to three months or longer.
While UHIN does not currently support the credentialing process, certain industry applications are in place, including the CAQH credentialing application. Until the credentialing process is complete, a provider cannot finish the rest of the enrollment process with a health plan. This is especially important for 98 percent of providers in the US who participate in Medicare and Medicare Advantage. In addition, nearly every health plan, including Medicare, requires EDI enrollment in order to start getting reimbursed for services.
What is Provider Enrollment?
Once a provider is officially welcomed into the network, the majority of health plans will require them to complete Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) enrollment, which is the technical connection between the provider and the plan. EDI enrollment allows providers to submit electronic claims to the plan and receive remittance for their services.
Electronic claims submission is nearly universal in the medical industry, according to the latest CAQH index report. In 2022, 97 percent of claims submissions transactions occurred electronically, giving both providers and health plans a strong motivation to ensure they are appropriately connected.
Unfortunately, neither the administrative nor the EDI enrollment processes are standardized across different health plans. This forces providers to juggle many different requirements and documentation requests for each individual payer. The complexity of managing requests from a slew of disparate plans and providers can lead to mistakes and omissions that extend the timeline.
Even more information may be required during EDI enrollment than credentialing. This can take an additional four to six weeks (or longer) on top of the credentialing timeframe. This is especially true if extensive contract negotiations are necessary or IT challenges get in the way.
In addition, smaller provider groups often do not have enough people-power to devote exclusively to enrollment, making it even more difficult for plans and providers to work together effectively.
UHIN’s Enrollment Team provides detailed next steps for enrollment based on each specific payer and transaction type for each case. Additionally, we provide defined next steps to move forward with enrollment, based on the payer requirements. UHIN can be reached at enrollment@uhin.org and we will be happy to provide enrollment direction, advice and helpful support through the EDI enrollment process.
How Can Health Plans Streamline Enrollment Processes?
Just like many other areas of the healthcare ecosystem, provider EDI enrollment can significantly benefit from digitization and strong partnerships with expert teams. The widespread lack of standardized processes means plans and providers have to consider each request as a one-off, which can take a great deal of time and effort to parse through without some help.
Charting a Course for Success
When working with providers, health plans should offer clear and detailed instructions on the information needed and the deadlines for delivering it.
Plans should assess their needs by charting out their existing enrollment workflow and identifying any bottlenecks that lead to lag time. Often, these pain points are related to delays in collecting information from providers and internal delays in processing paperwork once received. The result of these delays are wild swings in average completion time for provider onboarding, which creates unpredictability on both sides of the relationship.
Finding the Right Support
On the internal front, plans should seek out enrollment partners that can field provider requests on behalf of the payer, taking the task off the shoulders of health plan staff. It should take a specialist enrollment team less than one business day to process a request once all of the information is received. There may be additional waiting time depending on the unique payer requirements.
Health plans and providers should make sure they are working with a dedicated enrollment team that can take deep dives into problem-solving when unique technical or administrative challenges arise, such as a technology enhancement that can lead to the need for a process rewrite.
An experienced partner, such as UHIN, offers an expert enrollment team to help navigate the complicated enrollment process. Although we do not currently provide credentialing support, we have a proven history in expediting and accurately guiding providers through the enrollment process. Our enrollment team is based in the US and delivers in-depth knowledge and support to make the enrollment process as frictionless as possible. We can handle any questions you may have in this complicated and critical process.
Partnering with the Right EDI Enrollment Experts
Enrollment involves complex activities with many moving pieces. Getting them right is vital for the success of health plans and provider groups. By understanding the nuances of the process, plans and providers can start to tackle the pinch points that make network development so challenging. Plans that enlist the help of dedicated partners to take on key tasks, such as enrollment, have a better chance of creating a smoother onboarding experience and accelerating their success in a highly competitive marketplace.
UHIN’s enrollment team offers years of experience helping providers through the enrollment process. We provide direct support and in-depth knowledge to expedite the enrollment process and get providers over the finish line no matter how complex or unique the process may be.
Are you a current provider with a UHIN account and interested in learning more about enrollment? Contact enrollment@uhin.org or customer service at 877-693-3071.
If you’re new to UHIN, click below and tell us how we can help streamline EDI enrollment onboarding and relieve burdens for your health plan!
