Electronic fraud detection in the U.S. Medicaid Healthcare Program: lessons learned from other industries

It is estimated that between $600 and$850 billion annually is lost to fraud, waste, and abuse in the US healthcare system,with $125 to$175 billion of this due to fraudulent activity (Kelley 2009). Medicaid, a state-run, federally-matchedgovernment program which accounts for roughly one-quarter of all healthcare expenses in the US, has been particularlysusceptible targets for fraud in recent years. With escalating overall healthcare costs, payers, especially government-runprograms, must seek savings throughout the system to maintain reasonable quality of care standards. As such, the need foreffective fraud detection and prevention is critical. Electronic fraud detection systems are widely used in the insurance,telecommunications, and financial sectors. What lessons can be learned from these efforts and applied to improve frauddetection in the Medicaid health care program? In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature study to analyze theapplicability of existing electronic fraud detection techniques in similar industries to the US Medicaid program

Data Mining in Health-Care: Issues and a Research Agenda

While data mining has become a much-lauded tool in business and related fields, its role in the healthcare arena is still being explored. Currently, most applications of data mining in healthcare can be categorized into two areas: decision support for clinical practice, and policy planning/decision making. However, it is challenging to find empirical literature in this area since a substantial amount of existing work in data mining for health care is conceptual in nature. In this paper, we review the challenges that limit the progress made in this area and present considerations for the future of data mining in healthcare

Show Me Your Claims and I\u27ll Tell You Your Offenses: Machine Learning-Based Decision Support for Fraud Detection on Medical Claim Data

Health insurance claim fraud is a serious issue for the healthcare industry as it drives up costs and inefficiency. Therefore, claim fraud must be effectively detected to provide economical and high-quality healthcare. In practice, however, fraud detection is mainly performed by domain experts resulting in significant cost and resource consumption. This paper presents a novel Convolutional Neural Network-based fraud detection approach that was developed, implemented, and evaluated on Medicare Part B records. The model aids manual fraud detection by classifying potential types of fraud, which can then be specifically analyzed. Our model is the first of its kind for Medicare data, yields an AUC of 0.7 for selected fraud types and provides an applicable method for medical claim fraud detection

Show Me Your Claims and I'll Tell You Your Offenses: Machine Learning-Based Decision Support for Fraud Detection on Medical Claim Data

Health insurance claim fraud is a serious issue for the healthcare industry as it drives up costs and inefficiency. Therefore, claim fraud must be effectively detected to provide economical and high-quality healthcare. In practice, however, fraud detection is mainly performed by domain experts resulting in significant cost and resource consumption. This paper presents a novel Convolutional Neural Network-based fraud detection approach that was developed, implemented, and evaluated on Medicare Part B records. The model aids manual fraud detection by classifying potential types of fraud, which can then be specifically analyzed. Our model is the first of its kind for Medicare data, yields an AUC of 0.7 for selected fraud types and provides an applicable method for medical claim fraud detection

Data-Driven Implementation To Filter Fraudulent Medicaid Applications

There has been much work to improve IT systems for managing and maintaining health records. The U.S government is trying to integrate different types of health care data for providers and patients. Health care fraud detection research has focused on claims by providers, physicians, hospitals, and other medical service providers to detect fraudulent billing, abuse, and waste. Data-mining techniques have been used to detect patterns in health care fraud and reduce the amount of waste and abuse in the health care system. However, less attention has been paid to implementing a system to detect fraudulent applications, specifically for Medicaid. In this study, a data-driven system using layered architecture to filter fraudulent applications for Medicaid was proposed. The Medicaid Eligibility Application System utilizes a set of public and private databases that contain individual asset records. These asset records are used to determine the Medicaid eligibility of applicants using a scoring model integrated with a threshold algorithm. The findings indicated that by using the proposed data-driven approach, the state Medicaid agency could filter fraudulent Medicaid applications and save over $4 million in Medicaid expenditures

Data-Driven Implementation To Filter Fraudulent Medicaid Applications

There has been much work to improve IT systems for managing and maintaining health records. The U.S government is trying to integrate different types of health care data for providers and patients. Health care fraud detection research has focused on claims by providers, physicians, hospitals, and other medical service providers to detect fraudulent billing, abuse, and waste. Data-mining techniques have been used to detect patterns in health care fraud and reduce the amount of waste and abuse in the health care system. However, less attention has been paid to implementing a system to detect fraudulent applications, specifically for Medicaid. In this study, a data-driven system using layered architecture to filter fraudulent applications for Medicaid was proposed. The Medicaid Eligibility Application System utilizes a set of public and private databases that contain individual asset records. These asset records are used to determine the Medicaid eligibility of applicants using a scoring model integrated with a threshold algorithm. The findings indicated that by using the proposed data-driven approach, the state Medicaid agency could filter fraudulent Medicaid applications and save over $4 million in Medicaid expenditures

An Effective Data Sampling Procedure for Imbalanced Data Learning on Health Insurance Fraud Detection

Fraud detection has received considerable attention from many academic research and industries worldwide due to its increasing popularity. Insurance datasets are enormous, with skewed distributions and high dimensionality. Skewed class distribution and its volume are considered significant problems while analyzing insurance datasets, as these issues increase the misclassification rates. Although sampling approaches, such as random oversampling and SMOTE can help balance the data, they can also increase the computational complexity and lead to a deterioration of model\u27s performance. So, more sophisticated techniques are needed to balance the skewed classes efficiently. This research focuses on optimizing the learner for fraud detection by applying a Fused Resampling and Cleaning Ensemble (FusedRCE) for effective sampling in health insurance fraud detection. We hypothesized that meticulous oversampling followed with a guided data cleaning would improve the prediction performance and learner\u27s understanding of the minority fraudulent classes compared to other sampling techniques. The proposed model works in three steps. As a first step, PCA is applied to extract the necessary features and reduce the dimensions in the data. In the second step, a hybrid combination of k-means clustering and SMOTE oversampling is used to resample the imbalanced data. Oversampling introduces lots of noise in the data. A thorough cleaning is performed on the balanced data to remove the noisy samples generated during oversampling using the Tomek Link algorithm in the third step. Tomek Link algorithm clears the boundary between minority and majority class samples and makes the data more precise and freer from noise. The resultant dataset is used by four different classification algorithms: Logistic Regression, Decision Tree Classifier, k-Nearest Neighbors, and Neural Networks using repeated 5-fold cross-validation. Compared to other classifiers, Neural Networks with FusedRCE had the highest average prediction rate of 98.9%. The results were also measured using parameters such as F1 score, Precision, Recall and AUC values. The results obtained show that the proposed method performed significantly better than any other fraud detection approach in health insurance by predicting more fraudulent data with greater accuracy and a 3x increase in speed during training

Examining the Transitional Impact of ICD-10 on Healthcare Fraud Detection

On October 1st, 2015, the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) will be mandatorily implemented in the United States. Although this medical classification system will allow healthcare professionals to code with greater accuracy, specificity, and detail, these codes will have a significant impact on the flavor of healthcare insurance claims. While the overall benefit of ICD-10 throughout the healthcare industry is unquestionable, some experts believe healthcare fraud detection and prevention could experience an initial drop in performance due to the implementation of ICD-10. We aim to quantitatively test the validity of this concern regarding an adverse transitional impact. This project explores how predictive fraud detection systems developed using ICD-9 claims data will initially react to the introduction of ICD-10. We have developed a basic fraud detection system incorporating both unsupervised and supervised learning methods in order to examine the potential fraudulence of both ICD-9 and ICD-10 claims in a predictive environment. Using this system, we are able to analyze the ability and performance of statistical methods trained using ICD-9 data to properly identify fraudulent ICD-10 claims. This research makes contributions to the domains of medical coding, healthcare informatics, and fraud detection

Data-Driven Models, Techniques, and Design Principles for Combatting Healthcare Fraud

In the U.S., approximately $700 billion of the$2.7 trillion spent on healthcare is linked to fraud, waste, and abuse. This presents a significant challenge for healthcare payers as they navigate fraudulent activities from dishonest practitioners, sophisticated criminal networks, and even well-intentioned providers who inadvertently submit incorrect billing for legitimate services. This thesis adopts Hevner’s research methodology to guide the creation, assessment, and refinement of a healthcare fraud detection framework and recommended design principles for fraud detection. The thesis provides the following significant contributions to the field:1. A formal literature review of the field of fraud detection in Medicaid. Chapters 3 and 4 provide formal reviews of the available literature on healthcare fraud. Chapter 3 focuses on defining the types of fraud found in healthcare. Chapter 4 reviews fraud detection techniques in literature across healthcare and other industries. Chapter 5 focuses on literature covering fraud detection methodologies utilized explicitly in healthcare.2. A multidimensional data model and analysis techniques for fraud detection in healthcare. Chapter 5 applies Hevner et al. to help develop a framework for fraud detection in Medicaid that provides specific data models and techniques to identify the most prevalent fraud schemes. A multidimensional schema based on Medicaid data and a set of multidimensional models and techniques to detect fraud are presented. These artifacts are evaluated through functional testing against known fraud schemes. This chapter contributes a set of multidimensional data models and analysis techniques that can be used to detect the most prevalent known fraud types.3. A framework for deploying outlier-based fraud detection methods in healthcare. Chapter 6 proposes and evaluates methods for applying outlier detection to healthcare fraud based on literature review, comparative research, direct application on healthcare claims data, and known fraudulent cases. A method for outlier-based fraud detection is presented and evaluated using Medicaid dental claims, providers, and patients.4. Design principles for fraud detection in complex systems. Based on literature and applied research in Medicaid healthcare fraud detection, Chapter 7 offers generalized design principles for fraud detection in similar complex, multi-stakeholder systems.<br/