After intense advocacy from the California Medical Association (CMA), American Medical Association (AMA) and other health care groups, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on Saturday they would be offering advance payments for physicians and health care providers experiencing claims disruptions due to the cyberattack that caused a devastating nationwide outage that has left providers without revenue or the ability to submit claims for more than two weeks.  

Noridian, California’s Medicare carrier, has now posted the form practices can fill out to request a Change Healthcare/Optum payment disruption Accelerated Payment [docx]. The form must be initialed for certification of facts and signed by the practice’s authorized official that is legally able to make financial commitments and assume financial obligations on behalf of the practice. The completed form should be sent to Noridian at PartBadvancepayments@noridian.com or via fax to (701) 277-7865. Noridian has advised CMA that it expects requests to be processed and money to be deposited within 7 business days of receipt of a request.

For additional information such as eligibility requirements, required acknowledgement of terms, and payment amount, please refer to the CMS Fact Sheet.