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From The Field: RAC experiences

Recovery Auditor Report, April 29, 2010

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A corporate compliance professional from a hospital in Indiana, who wished to remain anonymous, shared with us her organization’s recent RAC experience. She had this to say:

We are having a terrible time with CGI’s ability to accept faxed documentation. Their fax machine is slow to receive and cannot handle the volume of incoming faxes, therefore most attempts result in “error”. One fax that we were able to get through took two hours to complete. Customer service has informed us that CGI is aware of the problem but there are no plans to increase fax input. I sent an e-mail in mid-March to the CMS RAC project officer and he forwarded it to CGI. A CGI representative emailed me and said she would follow up with me personally but I have heard nothing. This week I sent another e-mail to the CMS RAC project officer and CGI official, but have not received any correspondence in return. If CMS lists faxing as an allowable method to forward documentation to the RACs, then the RAC should be set up to accommodate the volume of incoming faxes.

A second problem is the RAC's delay in logging the receipt of records on the provider portal of their Web site. Regardless of the method we utilize to forward the documentation, we can’t tell if they received our records because they are always behind in logging the information. This results in extra phone calls to customer service to verify that the records were received. Right now our RAC is still requesting small volumes of records. If the workflow is behind now, what will happen when they are requesting up to 300 records?

On the positive side, the customer service representatives are friendly and try to be helpful.

Help us to understand your RAC experience. Is your experience similar to this one? Have you had any experience with RACs at all? Do you have tips, ideas, questions, comments, or concerns to share with your peers? Submit your RAC stories and experiences to jcarroll@hcpro.com and please indicate whether you'd like to remain anonymous.

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