Health Information Management

State promises solution to payment problems from HIPAA-compliant billing system

HIPAA Weekly Advisor, March 7, 2005

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Providers in Maine who have been treating Medicaid patients for two months without receiving reimbursement will start seeing payments within seven days, reported the Bangor Daily News.

According to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), glitches in the state's new HIPAA-friendly billing system created a financial bottleneck, inappropriately denying claims and forcing 7,000 providers who treat Medicaid patients-including physicians, social workers, dentists, and physical therapists-to essentially work without pay.

Jack Nicholas, Maine's HHS commissioner, told the Daily News that he hopes to resolve the problem within 30 days, although he acknowledged that this estimate is optimistic. A similar problem in Georgia related to a new HIPAA-compliant billing system took almost a year to work out the kinks and get the system running properly.



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