Huron Consulting Group (NASDAQ: HURN), a leading provider of business consulting services, today announced its Huron Life Science's CARSM solution, which provides coverage analysis for research support in budgeting, billing and compliance. The solution helps healthcare and life sciences organizations quickly and compliantly meet the demands of sponsors and research teams by successfully applying Medicare's Clinical Trial Policy (CTP), federal device trial regulations, Medicaid limitations, and claims processing instructions.

"Huron's CAR solution helps clients eliminate a key bottleneck in the study initiation process by shifting the coverage analysis burden from an organization's staff to dedicated expert professionals. This service allows clients to complete the coverage analysis in as little as five business days," said Leah Guidry, managing director, Huron Life Sciences.

Huron Life Science's versatile CAR solution team includes clinical research, medical coding, and billing professionals who provide a comprehensive approach to address the following:

  • Identification and Coding: Review of relevant clinical trial documents to ensure that all patient care costs are identified and included in the billing grid with Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) and Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes.
  • Qualifying Clinical Trial Analysis: Assessment of the study's qualifying criteria for determining the appropriateness for seeking reimbursement for routine costs, such as benefit category, therapeutic intent, and "deemed status."
  • Limitations Analysis: Review of local, state and federal guidelines to identify limitations on coverage by Medicaid or Medicare.
  • Billing Determinations: Identification of the responsible party for each cost, which includes sponsor, patient/payer, or clinical department.

In developing the CAR solution, Huron worked with more than 75 institutions, trained more than 900 people, and conducted more than 2,700 coverage analyses. This extensive fieldwork created a coverage analysis solution that is cost-effective, consistent, and streamlined with an extra level of protection against incorrect billing or double billing. Huron Life Sciences has produced coverage analyses for a range of clients, including community hospitals, academic medical centers, teaching hospitals, research institutes, children's hospitals, and cancer centers.

"The CAR solution will help larger organizations address existing backlogs and ease peaks in workload caused by fluctuations in volume or temporary changes in staffing. It can also be a completely outsourced solution to help organizations with smaller research volumes where it is hard to justify full-time resources," said Rick Rohrbach, managing director, Huron Life Sciences. "This solution will be an important tool to help healthcare and life sciences organizations quickly and compliantly meet the demands of sponsors and research teams."

About Huron Life Sciences

Huron Life Sciences serves healthcare providers, academic medical centers, pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology companies and the law firms that support these organizations to define, measure, and achieve financial, operational, and strategic objectives. Learn more at www.huronconsultinggroup.com/lifesciences or follow us on Twitter: @Huron.

About Huron Consulting Group

Huron Consulting Group helps clients in diverse industries improve performance, comply with complex regulations, resolve disputes, recover from distress, leverage technology, and stimulate growth. The Company teams with its clients to deliver sustainable and measurable results. Huron provides services to a wide variety of both financially sound and distressed organizations, including leading academic institutions, healthcare organizations, Fortune 500 companies, medium-sized businesses, and the law firms that represent these various organizations. Learn more at www.huronconsultinggroup.com.

Huron Consulting Group
Jennifer Frost Hennagir
312-880-3260
jfrost-hennagir@huronconsultinggroup.com