Aetna to eliminate paper checks

Aetna is moving to electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments and eliminating payments via paper checks. The insurance company recently announced it will require physicians to receive payments and explanation of benefits statements electronically beginning in a few months. Aetna’s plan to go paperless coincides with the federal requirement that health plans must offer EFT payments in a standardized format and utilize new “operating rules” for both EFT and electronic remittance advice (ERA). Those regulations, mandated as part of the Affordable Care Act, went into effect Jan. 1.

Practices that move to EFT and ERA can reduce or eliminate the cost and inconvenience of manually processing paper payments and remittance. In addition, practices typically will receive payments faster and be able to verify payments more quickly using the ERA transaction. Practices looking to take advantage of these and other administrative simplification opportunities should discuss options with their practice management system vendor. MGMA has produced an EFT/ERA Guide to assist practices in this transition to electronic transactions.