ASHA's Payer Summit
Each year, ASHA's Health Care and Education Policy team invites members of the payer community to meet with us. The purpose of this meeting is to build a bridge between payers and ASHA members by discussing coverage and payment trends, sharing information with payers about audiology and speech-language pathology services, and advocating on behalf of ASHA members for robust coverage of their services. By building this bridge, we can help solve coverage issues with payers for our members faster while simultaneously providing member education about payer policies and best practices.
Who Attends the Payer Summit?
Representatives from many payers across the country receive invitations to attend this meeting. ASHA extends invitations to representatives from private insurance plans, utilization management companies, state Medicaid agencies, and Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs). ASHA leadership and advocacy staff attend and manage the event. If you have a payer contact that you would like to invite to our summit, please contact us at reimbursement@asha.org.
What Happens During the Payer Summit?
The agenda varies yearly depending on the top priorities of ASHA members and which payer representatives can attend. We facilitate conversations about ASHA members' challenges, payer challenges, and strategies to address them. In the past we have discussed over-the-counter hearing aids, Medicaid's Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) benefit, post-pandemic telehealth coverage, payment rate negotiations, prior authorization, and many other issues. We discuss the value and impact of the professions on the payers' beneficiaries. And we encourage payers to identify opportunities to incorporate audiologists' and speech-language pathologists' perspectives into their processes.
Check out a summary of the 2023 Payer Summit.
How Does the Payer Summit Help ASHA Members and Affiliates?
It isn't easy to get payers to make substantial changes that will positively impact you and your clients, patients, and students. The Payer Summit helps ASHA members by bringing your challenges and needs to the forefront of payers' minds and creates or strengthens relationships between ASHA and payer representatives. These relationships cannot guarantee change, but they do open doors for ASHA to go directly to our contacts when we have questions or concerns that we need to bring to them on behalf of our members. Some examples of positive outcomes from relationships formed during previous summits include:
- Some payers were encouraged to establish clinician review panels to provide feedback on their coverage policies.
- Medicaid programs added new CPT codes related to caregiver training to their fee schedules.
- ASHA advocacy staff successfully worked with payer representatives to get answers or address issues more quickly for individual ASHA members who needed help.
How Can You Get Involved?
Each year, ASHA members will be encouraged to submit their feedback and concerns for ASHA staff to share directly with payers. ASHA's advocacy staff also collects information and feedback we receive throughout the year to share during the summit.
