Electronic Claim Filing for Secondary Insurance

Our technical support and customer service staff regularly discuss questions our customers commonly ask. They often answers these questions in emails—repeatedly. For a long time, we have tried to answer some of these questions in documents to make it easier for our customers to succeed in their jobs. The Document Library page on our web site has always aimed to achieve that goal. This year, we implemented new and additional documents in a blog format on our web site as another way for our customers to get answers to their questions quickly.

Electronic claims filing is one of those areas where questions abound. No matter how many times we answer the same questions, we always need to come up with new and different ways to communicate information that is very familiar to us but not so apparent to our customers. This is the same kind of task psychotherapists and others who work with people in any capacity have to accomplish—coming up with different language and presentation of an idea so it can be heard and understood by the person being addressed.

Our lead technical support rep, Manon Faucher, recently wrote an article about how to file claims for secondary insurance carriers electronically. I have borrowed heavily from her article to address the issues that are crucial in successfully filing electronic claims for secondary insurance payers, assuming that the clearinghouse or site through which you send your electronic claims allows submission of secondaries and the payer to whom you are sending can receive secondary claims electronically.

In order to successfully submit secondary insurance claims, it is essential that you include the information about how the claim was adjudicated by the primary insurer. Doing so requires specific data in certain loops and segments of the 837P. If you are an SOS Software user, you should read Manon’s document. She created detailed instructions with screen shots for our product. If you use a different software product, you will need to find out from your vendor whether you can enter and they can report the necessary information to file the secondary claims.

• Primary payer– You must be able to indicate the order of liability for payers. Make sure you have the Primary set as such for this claim.
• Secondary payer– You must be able to designate this payer as Secondary for this claim. You must also be able to enter the “Amount received from other insurance”, information that would go in box 29 on the CMS 1500. This should go into the 2320 loop, segment AMT 02.
• Verify the Claim Adjustment Reason (CAR) amount– If you have received an Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) that automatically posted your payment from the Primary payer, you will need to determine that the total of the CARs matches the amount of the date of service Fee minus the payment from the primary insurance. Examples:

Denial – no payment by Primary

Fee for service $200
– Primary insurance did not pay for the service so $0 payment is entered for a Denial
CARs must equal the entire fee, $200.00

Partial Payment and Adjustment

Fee for service $200.00
– Primary insurance paid $120.00 and an adjustment of $30.00 was required from the payer
Amount of your CARs will have to equal to $80.00 ($200-$120)

The information from the CARs must be entered in the appropriate segment in the 2430 loop.

• Adjudication or payment date: Make sure you have entered the payment date in the appropriate place so it will show up in loop 2330B segment DTP 03.
• Generate and submit the secondary claim.

If your organization is not yet filing insurance claims electronically, it is certainly a service you should investigate. At some point in the future, it will certainly be required that all claims are filed electronically. In the meantime, it is a major convenience and financial savings for providers and organizations.

Maybe it is time for you to get rid of the paper!

Got any observations, opinions, reservations, cheers about filing claims electronically? Please share in the Comments section below. Thanks for reading!