Insurance fraud detection in healthcare involves analyzing claims for misleading or false information to get payers to reimburse ineligible medical procedures. Numerous insurance payers often use fraud management solutions to streamline and automate parts or entire investigative processes to filter out and flag suspicious claims. Investigating each claim manually is not only slow and tedious but not efficient, as an average payer is likely to deal with hundreds or even thousands of claims each day. In light of this, a reliable fraud management solution saves time and revenue.
Our fully-integrated and browser-based fraud software offer comprehensive functionality for predictive fraud detection in healthcare. At OSP, we create predictive data analysis that encompasses advanced analytics techniques, like statistics, text mining, data mining, and decision support engines. Our healthcare fraud software analyzes the complex and interrelated relationships among thousands of data sets to provide a potential fraud occurrence. We create medical fraud management systems that employ memory-based reasoning to identify similar cases from experience. It applies the collected information from these cases for in-depth classification and prediction. The memory-based reasoning applies to arbitrary data types, even non-relational data.
OSP’ bespoke fraud management systems can provide user provisioning protocols – including role assignment, user management, and Single Sign-On (SSO) functions. The effective fraud detection software solution is made possible with user activity monitoring, access request management, and account management of multiple digital identities. Furthermore, we deploy automated fraud alerts to monitor patient data and receive emails when new information arises. Our tailored fraud management software allows access to proprietary detection technology, which identifies providers displaying anomalous patient billing trends and patterns through data mining technologies. OSP’s fraud management software is tailor-made to address the vulnerabilities within a particular healthcare organization, in tandem with specific users, providers, and patients in question.
Remain compliant with state policies for healthcare payments to reduce investigation costs and avoid overpayments. Through electronic healthcare fraud detection technologies, we use automated systems that are free of errors, commonly made by human entries. This is because the technology used is consistent in its data entry features and in its analysis of the very same data to ensure holistic compliance. This feature is a must-have and eliminates the requirement for manual intervention of data reentries. The healthcare fraud detection system is geared to generate the data based on initial entries automatically. Thus, the data is organically created and generated and programmed efficiently. The software can be created with the provision of regular updates to keep up with evolving compliance requirements.
OSP’ healthcare fraud detection solutions can be made to find the concealed relationship among multiple payment data parameters, which may not be otherwise apparent. Further, our systems minimize the complexity of visual variance analysis by reducing the multi-dimensional data sets to 2 -3 dimensions. We build healthcare fraud detection solutions to create satisfaction among all healthcare industry entities through a diminished financial burden. Through our customized approach, we adhere to the organization’s specific requirements and build software that is easy to use, rich in features, and user-friendly in its approach through multiple functionality levels. Our software can be well integrated into the EHR system of the healthcare agency or practice.
OSP’s fraud detection software solutions can streamline the process through the entire lifecycle of claims submission. Whether it is a convenience of electronic data entry or validation through the use of technology or even the flexibility of errors being flagged before submission – the benefits are endless of a carefully crafted system that is evident in increasing revenue. Through intelligent technologies within the fraud detection software solutions, we offer the Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which has a high potential in diminishing the possibility of serious errors in coding and claims filing. This is done through the efficient scanning of documents and electronic programming and isolation.
Our solutions are created with the capacity to highlight claims that are likely to be rejected or refused. This will enable faster problem-solving and efficiency, thereby increased. Based on past inputs, our fraud detection software can predict claims that are potentially those which could be denied. Prioritization becomes much easier through this feature, with attention demanded towards areas of immediate attention, such as pending matters. Accessibility is further increased through electronic documentation and records and real-time access to current and past records, along with areas that need to be checked. It also reduces the need for manual processing. Finally, professional claims can be adjudicated in real-time through interactive, transactional experiences.
This is the biggest advantage of using a fraud management system for healthcare payers. Experts estimate that insurance fraud costs billions of dollars annually in losses for the healthcare industry. In light of this, OSP can leverage its decade-long experience in healthcare technology to build custom solutions for payers and improve the efficiency and productivity of claims analytics. This prevents fraudulent claims from being approved and saves precious revenue.
An average insurance payer may process hundreds of claims daily from numerous payers. In the absence of fraud management systems, verifying each claim is inefficient and slow, and error-prone. As a result, it would take longer to assess and approve or disapprove claims that deviate from normalcy. But using software for healthcare fraud detection accelerates the entire process, getting treatments approved and coverage reimbursed faster.
OSP can build a fraud management solution customized to payer needs that can detect any patterns of deviation from established baselines of regular claims. This not only speeds up the process of identifying suspicious claims but also highlights the methods used by fraudsters to try and pass off inauthentic claims as genuine ones. This type of awareness improves fraud detection's efficiency and productivity and enables payers to respond better to such claims.
The process of identifying and preventing fraudulent activities of a person or organization is called fraud management. It involves analyzing operations, transactions, and everyday workflows to identify suspicious behavior and flag them down.
Fraud detection in healthcare consists of preventing fraudulent claims from being approved by payers, resulting in fraudulent reimbursements.
1. Deterrence
As the name suggests, this is perhaps the first activity regarding healthcare fraud detection and management. Means of deterrence are implemented to discourage fraudsters from engaging in unscrupulous activities. Coupled with strict laws that impose punishment, payers may also take stern action against fraudsters. This could include rolling back credentialing on providers and initiating separate legal action.
2. Prevention
Preventing health insurance fraud involves comprehensive adjudication processes that scrutinize each claim. This process is designed to spot anomalies and deviations from standard parameters to be flagged down for in-depth investigations. As a result, suspicious claims are filtered out to be checked for fraud.
3. Detection
As mentioned earlier, detecting fraud is a time-taking and resource-intensive task. It involves scrutinizing claims to identify any abnormalities. These are then investigated further to see if they are fraudulent.
4. Investigation
It is closely investigated if a claim is found to be abnormal or deviate significantly from generally observed criteria.
5. Sanction and Redress
When a fraudulent claim is discovered, the payer might take appropriate steps to address this matter. The payer might take legal action and demand compensation. This could also be followed by disassociating with the entity that generated the claim.
Increased Revenue for Payers
Research has shown that healthcare fraud costs billions of dollars for the healthcare industry each year. Payers shell out large sums of money in reimbursements for faulty claims. But fraud detection for healthcare saves this money for payers, leading to better revenues overall.
Improved Patient Experience
Fraud management systems in healthcare insurance streamline all activities in the workflows surrounding fraud detection and response. This leads to better adjudication of claims and lowers waiting times for patients requiring procedures. Streamlined claims would also reduce unnecessary denial and improve the patient’s overall experience.
Reduces Healthcare Spending
The spending on healthcare in the United States topped $4 trillion. Insurance fraud eventually adds up to the tally and leads to increased scrutiny, which in-turns lead to increased costs in the long run. But using fraud management systems curbs fraud and can eventually reduce spending on healthcare.
Billing for Unnecessary Tests
This is one of the oldest and most common forms of medical scams. Doctors misrepresent patients’ diagnoses and bill for tests or scans that are completely unnecessary.
Inflating Bills
This is most commonly observed in Medicaid. Providers often pile on or exaggerate the scope of services, leading to larger claims.
Billing for Services Not Rendered
This, too, is one of the most common insurance frauds committed by providers. They bill for services like tests, X-rays, or medication never provided.
Billing Personal Expenses to Medicaid
This fraud is seen more often in nursing homes that submit annual cost reports. It is common for some caregivers or administrators to pass off their expenses to the payer. This could include travel expenses, vehicular costs, or other material expenses.
Disinformation by Patients
This is when patients lie to gain benefits. Some common examples include faking workplace injury to receive compensation or disability payments, listing someone unrelated as a family member for coverage, and claiming coverage for services not received.
Monitoring and Audits
Any amount of technological advancement cannot replace internal monitoring and audits. Protocols and procedures to cross-check and verify medical services alongside claims are vital to prevent fraud.
Compliance Officers
Hiring a designated official to ensure compliance is enforcing the policies, protocols, and procedures put in place. In short, the officers monitor and check for compliance.
Staff Training and Education
This is one of the most important aspects of fraud detection and prevention. Training the staff to stay vigilant and flag down any discrepancies will go a long way in curbing fraud.
Response to Frauds
A strong deterrence often helps with preventing crimes. The promise of severe consequences will deter unscrupulous individuals from committing fraudulent activities.
Healthcare fraud costs the industry tens of billions of dollars each year. Stopping this would require sweeping policy reforms at all levels. Compliance measures, audits, and corresponding protocols to ensure them are extremely necessary to stop healthcare fraud.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have shown immense promise in detecting health insurance fraud. These algorithms can be trained with relevant data to detect deviations from established benchmarks. The more data they receive, the better they become. When such algorithms process claims, they can rapidly detect variations from normalcy with great accuracy every time. Professionals with experience can further scrutinize these claims.
AI and ML systems have shown a very high detection rate and are touted to be vital for this purpose. A combination of policy, compliance measures and technology adoption are needed to stop or reduce healthcare fraud.
Fraud is the intentional disinformation, deception, or falsification of facts to gain unlawful benefits. Examples of healthcare fraud include falsifying claims, medical services, or eligibility for monetary gain.
Abuse indicates activities that are inappropriate or outside of acceptable standards of professionalism or necessity. Examples of healthcare abuse include repeated claims for services deemed unnecessary, unscrupulous billing, or refusing access to medical records.
Healthcare fraud is the deliberate misrepresentation of facts for personal benefit. Abuse refers to practices that take unfair advantage of a system for personal gain, which usually affects another stakeholder adversely.
Fraud involves deceit, lying, and falsehoods. Abuse includes all of these alongside business practices to deliberately exploit a system. When it comes to healthcare, frauds are always illegal and indefensible, while abuse might be defensible and repeatable with a false sense of justification. A good example of this could be –
An insurance claim fraud might involve a provider falsifying the services provided to inflate the billable amount. On the other hand, abuse in this context could mean deliberately providing unnecessary medical services to unsuspecting patients to claim more reimbursement than deserved.