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Sunday, October 7, 2012

What Is Medicaid Risk Adjustment?

By Susan McDonald


The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have created and been using a risk adjustment program that is used to help regulate the quantity of payments to be given to members using the Medicare Advantage plan. Medicare Advantage utilizes a formula that takes into account various diagnostic data and client history in order to calculate the risk factors of a member. When put into simple terms, this risk adjustment model takes the client's health concerns and puts a price tag on how much each issue will likely cost the private health care plan over a period of time. Risk adjustment has been used within Medicare and Medicaid for a long period of time and is continually being bettered and researched.

One of the most important parts of an effective Medicare risk adjustment is being able to appropriately predict the care costs of a client connected to a particular disease. Currently Medicare gets its information from the client's health plan in the form of claims data as the method for defining the payment for risk adjustment. This means that from the data gathered through the information given to Medicare by private health insurance companies is the foremost source of determining how much payment these private plans should receive to cover their member's likely health care costs.

Being able to correctly estimate what the cost of care for a particular plan member is likely to be, is an important part in making a productive risk adjustment model. The Medicare risk adjustment model uses the information they gain through the client's health plan and claims data as a way to develop the estimated cost. This means that the health insurance companies play an integral part in helping to keep the costs of the Medicare program correct as it is the foremost source of information used to base the payments off of.

One of the common mistakes is that of applying or listing a limited number of diagnostic codes to clients. In some cases clients will be listed to have a certain number of diagnostic codes, when in fact there are numerous more codes that apply to their health and situation that haven't been listed.

Correct Medicare risk adjustment can help to limit the quantity of overspending on the budget of the centers of Medicare and Medicaid. To have proper and correct risk adjustment for each client, there needs to be more effort on correct reporting and open communication between the supplier, insurer and the Medicare Advantage program. There is a lot of promise when it comes to improving this system to more correctly estimate costs.




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1 comments:

Unknown said...

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Medicare Risk Adjustment Coding

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