Company: HUM
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000049071-25-000007
Chunk: 57

Company: HUMANA INC
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 8
Chunk 57
---
0 (BIPA), generally pays more where a plan's membership has higher expected costs. Under this model, rates paid to MA plans are based on actuarially determined bids, which include a process whereby our prospective payments are based on our estimated cost of providing standard Medicare-covered benefits to an enrollee with a "national average risk profile." That baseline payment amount is adjusted to account for certain demographic characteristics and health status of our enrolled members. Under the risk-adjustment methodology, all MA plans must collect from providers and submit the necessary diagnosis code information to CMS within prescribed deadlines. The CMS risk-adjustment model uses the diagnosis data, collected from providers, to calculate the health status-related risk-adjusted premium payment to MA plans, which CMS further adjusts for coding pattern differences between the health plans and the government fee-for-service (FFS) program. We generally rely on providers, including certain providers in our network who are our employees, to code their claim submissions with appropriate diagnoses, which we send to CMS as the basis for our health status-adjusted payment received from CMS under the actuarial risk-adjustment model. We also rely on these providers to document appropriately all medical data, including the diagnosis data submitted with claims. In addition, we conduct medical record reviews as part of our data and payment accuracy compliance efforts, to more accurately reflect diagnosis conditions under the risk adjustment model. CMS and the Office of the Inspector General of Health and Human Services, or HHS-OIG, perform audits of various companies’ risk adjustment diagnosis data submissions. We refer to these audits as Risk-Adjustment Data Validation Audits, or RADV audits. RADV audits review medical records in an attempt to validate provider medical record documentation and coding practices that influence the calculation of health status-related premium payments to MA plans.  In 2012, CMS released an MA contract-level RADV methodology that would extrapolate the results of each CMS RADV audit sample to the audited MA contract’s entire health status-related risk adjusted premium amount for the year under audit.  In doing so, CMS recognized “that the documentation standard used in RADV audits to determine a contract’s payment error (medical records) is different from the documentation standard used to develop the Part C risk-adjustment model (FFS claims).”  To correct for this difference, CMS stated that it would apply a “Fee-for-Service Adjuster (FFS Adjuster)” as “an offset to the preliminary recovery amount.”  This adjuster would be “calculated by CMS based on a RADV-like