With the official NPI implementation date upon us, California’s Medicare carrier – NHIC – is taking steps to ensure all providers are properly enrolled so that their payments will not be interrupted. As we told you in our last Alert, NHIC reports that the payments of more than 5,000 physicians who work for or contract with groups in Northern California are at risk. This impacts groups of all sizes.
Affected physicians must submit updated 855R forms for each of the groups they bill for no later than August 1. (NHIC has pushed back the deadline, originally June 1, to August 1.) This form reassigns their Medicare payment to their group(s). If the forms are not submitted by the deadline, groups will not get paid for the physicians’ Medicare services after August 1.
CMA strongly urges all physicians who work for groups or contract with groups in Northern California to contact the NHIC hotline at 877/527-6613 to ensure that you have filled out the required 855R form for each of the groups to which you want to reassign your Medicare payments. Physicians who enrolled as Medicare providers prior to 2006 may also need to fill out form 855I.
Groups can help physicians fill out these forms, but the physicians must sign them. To complete the 855R, physicians will need their NPI, the tax ID number for each of the groups to whom they want to assign payments, and the signatures of the groups’ authorizing agents. The authorizing agent’s signature is required.
