As you may have heard, UnitedHealthcare now requires a referral for specialty care from the patient’s primary care provider for Medicare Advantage HMO and HMO‑POS plans. These referrals must be submitted before the patient’s appointment and retroactive referrals will not be accepted.
While this change does not apply to Medicare PPO or traditional Medicare plans, we know requirements from other payers may change. Nebraska Medicine is committed to making this transition as smooth as possible for you and your patients. To simplify the process, we have enabled referrals through OneChart Link for all referrals. Utilizing OneChart Link will allow you to submit and view your patient’s information and updates in real-time. We are also working on a faxing option and ways to improve and standardize our pre‑visit process to identify appointments that may be missing a referral before their visit, when possible.
Our goal is to work closely with you to make this process as smooth as possible and help ensure your patient’s care is covered by their insurance, so they do not have delays in care and that their care is covered. We know this is a huge change, and we appreciate your partnership as we work together to simplify this change in a way that best supports our shared patients.
We will be providing more information soon. In the meantime, please contact physicianoutreach@nebraskamed.com for more information on OneChart Link. We enjoy our partnership with you and look forward to working together to help our shared patients.