HHS has reduced its Medicare appeals backlog by 99.8 percent, according to an April 7 status report.
The agency has been required to reduce its backlog through annual deadline-based targets as the result of a 2018 federal court ruling.
The original lawsuit from the American Hospital Association stretched back to 2014 and was filed because hospitals were waiting 16 months for an appeals hearing on average and waited up to five years or more for a decision. There were 426,594 appeals identified in the 2018 court order.
Because HHS has now met its legal obligation and eliminated nearly the entire backlog, the court dissolved an order forcing the agency to hold a hearing and issue a decision no more than 90 days after a Medicare claims denial is appealed.
"The backlog posed a widespread threat of hospital insolvencies and patient access to care across the country," AHA General Counsel and Secretary Melinda Hatton said in a special bulletin April 10. "Going forward AHA will remain vigilant and hold HHS to account if a backlog begins to develop again in the future."