The GNYHA Recovery Audit Contract (RAC) Database and Tracking Tool was created to help hospital staff improve the tracking of time-sensitive tasks related to the Medicare Recovery Audit Contract (RAC) demonstration project, which ended on March 27, 2008. The RAC tool enabled hospitals to monitor RAC medical record requests and appeals and to manage the overall impact of payment errors by using automated worklists and reports.

Now that the RAC will become a nationwide audit function under the Medicare Fee for Service Program, GNYHA is converting its RAC Tracking Tool to a Web-based product with greatly enhance functionality to generate more facility reports and enable hospitals to provide data to the American Hospital Association on a facility-level basis without having to manually key data into a Web site. The enhanced RAC tool will be available to Medicare providers nationwide. For more information on the RAC tool, please contact Stewart M. Presser, Vice President for Corporate Affairs at GNYHA Ventures, Inc. (212) 506-5444 or presser@gnyha.org

About the Recovery Audit Contract (RAC) Demonstration Project
As part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, providers in New York, California and Florida—and later South Carolina and Massachusetts and Arizona—were selected to be subject to the Medicare Recovery Audit Contract (RAC) demonstration project. This demonstration project lasted three years and used private recovery firms paid on a contingency fee basis to conduct post-payment reviews to identify Medicare fee-for-service overpayments. The demonstration ran from March 2005 to March 2008. Under the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, (TRHCA), the United States Congress authorized the expansion of RACs nationwide by January 2010. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which operates the Medicare program, has established four RAC regions, which are illustrated here along with the estimated start up date for RAC activities in that area.