The Center for Medicare Services (CMS) has just premiered it’s new Secondary Payer Recovery Portal, which promises to streamline the delivery of crucial information attorneys need to protect their clients in a personal injury recovery.
For years, the MSPRC has struggled to deliver the lien information attorneys need when resolving their clients’ injury claims. Hours on hold and months for written responses were the norms attorneys suffered with when trying to comply with Medicare’s antiquated reimbursement process. Recently, CMS let the contract with the vendor that had been administering the reimbursement process expire, letting another vendor take over the duties temporarily. The result was immediate: better response times and more efficient lien resolution. But the problems of the past still plagued the process.
Last year, CMS announced that it was developing a web-based portal, similar to its popular MyMedicare.gov website, which would give beneficiaries and their representatives instant access to information that traditionally took months to receive.
Today the registration process has opened and anyone with a Medicare reimbursement obligation (or a client with one) can register for access. A username and temporary password will then be mailed to the registrant, so I cannot provide any feedback about the portal itself, but this promises to be another step in the right direction for CMS when it comes to lien resolution.
Stay tuned – I will follow up on this post when I have had the chance to test drive the system. If you’re like me and register right away and let me know what you think.
Of course as soon as I report this, the site goes down due to the tremendous traffic trying to access it.
The register link doesn’t work, it’s close, try: http://www.cob.cms.hhs.gov/MSPRC/. Thanks for the great information! Got registered in minutes! Very helpful, thanks again!
Thanks, Chris! You were right, the URL was input as MSPRC instead of MSPRP. The links have been updated.
Steve
Site did not go down – the author (uh, that would be me) input the URL incorrectly. I put MSPRC instead of MSPRP. Oops.
Is this site different than mymedicare.gov, or the MSPRC site?
I cannot get this site to load: http://www.cob.cms.hhs.gov/MSPRP
It is a shame that MSPRC spent so much time on their website, as it is very limited on the information it provides. It doesn’t even mention the ‘pre-settlement’ compromise. It is clear Medicare doesn’t want you to know about that. Plus, it does not give enough details about the Fixed Percentage Option. It is obvious the site is written in such a simplistic manner, it is meant for someone that can barely read. It’s a shame that even the attorney toolkits do not show much more detail than the beneficiary toolkits. For those of us unfortunate not to have a lawyer working on our subrogation case, the process is unbearable.
Plus Medicaid beneficiaries need a website like Medicare’s, as we the claimant can’t even find out what the constantly changing physical therapy benefits are each year. We have to call Medicaid/Provider One, that is if you can get through to a live person, and lie that we are a provider to find out how many Physical Therapy Benefits we get each year! Plus we cannot find out how many physical therapy benefits, of about the 6 visits per year we get, we have used.