Medicare appeals team seeks digital workflow

The Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals plans to switch from a paper-based system for passing records along the appeals chain to a digital system, solicitation documents show.

The current system for exchanging legal and medical documents along the five-level appeals chain requires a hodgepodge of faxing, mailing paper documents and manually re-entering information between incompatible computer systems managed by different contractors, according to the sources sought notice posted Tuesday.

That system has become increasingly onerous as the office’s workload more than doubled to about 375,000 appeals and claims between fiscal years 2011 and 2012.

“In an effort to accommodate the rapidly growing workloads, OMHA needs to take advantage of the efficiencies that electronic processing can produce,” the document said.

A sources sought document means the office has not committed to purchasing any new technology. 

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