According to the 2014 CAQH Index, responding health plans representing 103 million enrollees returned data on claim attachments. There was approximately one claim attachment for every 24 claims during 2013 from those same responses.
Interestingly, the vast majority of claim attachments were submitted manually via paper delivery or fax. CAQH counted approximately 46 million claim attachments processed among the plans reporting, which can be extrapolated to roughly 110 million claim attachments industry-wide.
CAQH also estimates another 10 million prior authorization attachments. This statistic suggests a total of 120 million attachments annually across health care.
There’s a clarification, however, that must be made when dealing with attachments. Electronic attachments, in and of themselves, are not always the same despite industry rhetoric claiming that there is little difference between the health care sectors.
When dealing with the substance of attachments, there are two major distinct segments that providers must accommodate. These two segments are vaguely similar at the highest level, but distinctly different at the business process level for a few reasons. These two segments align with respective accountable payer organizations:
- Health and dental plans: commercial health plans and federal and state fiscal agents and administrators,
- Workers compensation (WorkComp): property and casualty insurance carriers and third-party-administrators.
The majority of the 120 million attachments are processed by health plans. Dental plans also manage an essentially equivalent business process for handling attachments, often through the same technical channels and human resources with similar skills.
Workers compensation claims, on the other hand, while voluminous, have a notably different set of business processes because of a number of distinctions in both the property and casualty insurance business and in the nature of “claims” in WorkComp parlance.
A WorkComp claim is generally related to an individual injured on the job. That claim may have a life of many months, or, in some cases, years. Resulting from that claim are typically many bills (or e-bills) that usually have an attachment. The e-bill submission process is more similar to property and casualty processes — such as auto physical damage — than to traditional health and dental plan processes.
An interesting contributor to this distinction is that property and casualty insurers are not considered “covered entities” under the 1996 HIPAA legislation. This is important, and any industry observers not recognizing this are failing to accommodate a major consideration.
Just as not all claim attachments are equal, neither are all vendors. For example, some companies that are heavily involved in the P&C space don’t work with the medical side, while others focus almost exclusively on medical. Vendors usually serve one of the two often-unrelated markets.
Providers must be aware of the differences. P&C electronic attachments, even though they may sound as if they’re in the health care setting, just don’t carry the same weight as electronic claims actually exchanged to support patient claims generated within a health system. Likewise, those vendors that work almost entirely in health care have little claim, if any, to the P&C market.
In a market filled with health care claims-related vendors, health care organizations must be able to place their trust in partners that understand the complete landscape of the health care space. They should also know that even though WorkComp may appear on the surface to be medical, it requires an entirely different scope of work than their counterparts working in the space. In this burgeoning sector of health care administration, messages are often painted too broadly with too wide a brush and health care leaders should be wary when entering into conversations that broach the subject of electronic attachments.
For the improvement of all parties involved, vendors should recognize and articulate the differences between health and dental attachment processes and WorkComp attachment processes in their public messages. The industry will be better served if vendors accept a mandate to clarify market confusion and to paint clearer lines as to their roles in electronic attachments.