Payment integrity Determination letter
Centene · payment integrity
Claims queue/ CLM-0000014/ Determination letter
Determination

What the provider receives

A determination that says only “unsupported” cannot be answered: the provider cannot tell which question was decided, so the appeal addresses the wrong one and the reviewer has nothing to audit. This letter separates the three questions, numbers them, and says what would overturn each.

Drafted by Autonomize · not sent

Overpayment notice — Gulf Coast General Hospital

$6,572.28

Re: claim CLM-0000014 · member MBR-90248117 · admission 5 March 2026

A post-payment review of the claim above identified $6,572.28 as recoverable. The review separates three questions, and each is answered in its own numbered section below. Each section can be disputed on its own; disputing one does not put the others in issue.

Policy basis

This review applied each policy as it stood on 05 Mar 2026, the date of service, not as it stands today. No policy cited below has changed since then, so the current version and the governing version are the same document.

1 Coding Was the service coded according to the coding rule? Finding

The MCC carries a present-on-admission indicator of N. Stage 3 pressure ulcer L89.153 was coded as the major complication and reported POA = N, meaning it developed during the stay. A hospital-acquired condition cannot be used to assign a higher-paying DRG.

Remedy: Reprice to DRG 872.

To dispute section 1 Cite the coding rule or payer guidance under which DRG 871 · sepsis with MCC is correct on this record, or submit a corrected claim at the level the record supports.

2 Clinical documentation Does the record support the service that was coded? Nothing found

No clinical-evidence defect. The record supports the service as documented; what is wrong is how it was coded or priced.

3 Payment What, if anything, is recoverable? Finding

Weight difference of 0.9192 at a $7,150.00 base rate. DRG 871 weight 1.9425 paid $13,888.88. DRG 872 weight 1.0233 pays $7,316.60. The recoverable difference is $6,572.28.

LineCode PaidAllowable Recoverable
1 DRG 871
1 × per service
$13,888.88 $7,316.60 $6,572.28
Priced against
MS-DRG 871 carries a relative weight of 1.9425 and MS-DRG 872 a weight of 1.0233, a difference of 0.9192. CMS MS-DRG v43
To dispute section 3 Show that the allowable applied here is the wrong one — wrong site of service, wrong locality, or wrong fee schedule year. The arithmetic above is shown in full so it can be checked directly.
Your rights
  • You may dispute any section on its own. Name the section number and send what that section asks for; the other sections are unaffected.
  • Submit a dispute within 30 days of the date of this notice and payment activity is held pending review.
  • You may instead remit the amount above within 30 days, or notify us in writing that you elect offset against future payments.

Payment Integrity · 1-800-000-0000 · recoveries@example.org

What the agent did not do

Said on the letter itself, not only here. The case for putting an agent this close to a recovery rests on where it stops.

  • This letter was drafted by the review and has not been sent.
  • No recoupment has been taken and no offset has been applied.
  • No provider record was corrected and no authorization was changed.
  • A named reviewer signs, or does not.

Every figure is derived

The addressing — who it is to, which claim, the phone number — comes from the audit book. Everything that asserts something is computed from the claim when the page is built: the amount is the sum of the line variances, the sections are the finding's own layers, and the policy version is resolved at the date of service. A seeded sentence can drift from the claim it describes. This cannot.

Sections in dispute

Each is answered separately. A provider who disputes one does not put the others in issue, and the analyzer routes their argument to the section it actually contests.

1 Coding
separately appealable
2 Clinical documentation
nothing found — not in issue
3 Payment
separately appealable
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