Copied from another thread, but worthy of its own:

Here is what is happening to the physicians in my area in SC. We are getting duplicate payments from insurance companies. An example...today we got a check from Hitachi managed care for a Hitachi employee for $ 103 dollars. This was a duplicate payment for a medical service last year which had already been paid. Listen... the date of service was 5-10-99. The managed care administrator sent us a check for that service on June 3, 1999. Today, the duplicate payment was for date of service 10-19-99. We never saw the patient on that day. Note that the 05 month had been omitted by the computer and another check was issued. This is happening over and over to the physicians. Some of the checks are rather large for major surgeries. Some offices simply keep the checks to see if the error is caught; some mark void and return the check. I have no way of knowing the amount of money involved, but in our area, it is big.

-- Don (don@aol.com), February 02, 2000.

-- noname (no@address.nope), February 02, 2000

Answers

* * * 20000203 Thursday

Don:

Interesting anomaly. Definitely date (expansion) related. It does look like the systems is trying to put an 8-digit/char date ("05101999") into a 6-char (mmddyy) bucket.

Technically, this is easy to fix. It's all those "horses" that got loose before it was discovered the "coral" (checks issued) was opened.

What a mess to clean up.

This will be typical fallout from those that didn't do enough testing before rolling out "fixed" systems into production.

Regards, Bob Mangus

* * *

-- Robert Mangus (rmangus1@yahoo.com), February 03, 2000.

Interesting that I recieved in Jan. a bill from a doctor my son had seen in Aug. '98.

A call to the HMO confirmed that the bill had been paid in Oct. '98.

The girl I talked to at Aetna said they were dealing with "tons of problems"......

-- Sheila (sross@bconnex.net), February 03, 2000.