A survey on the state of healthcare upcoding fraud analysis and detection

  • Richard Bauder
  • Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar
  • Naeem Seliya
Article
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Abstract

From its infancy in the 1910s, healthcare group insurance continues to increase, creating a consistently rising burden on the government and taxpayers. The growing number of people enrolled in healthcare programs such as Medicare, along with the enormous volume of money in the healthcare industry, increases the appeal for and risk of fraudulent activities. One such fraud, known as upcoding, is a means by which a provider can obtain additional reimbursement by coding a certain provided service as a more expensive service than what was actually performed. With the proliferation of data mining techniques and the recent and continued availability of public healthcare data, the application of these techniques towards fraud detection, using this increasing cache of data, has the potential to greatly reduce healthcare costs through a more robust detection of upcoding fraud. Presently, there is a sizable body of healthcare fraud detection research available but upcoding fraud studies are limited. Audit data can be difficult to obtain, limiting the usefulness of supervised learning; therefore, other data mining techniques, such as unsupervised learning, must be explored using mostly unlabeled records in order to detect upcoding fraud. This paper is specific to reviewing upcoding fraud analysis and detection research providing an overview of healthcare, upcoding, and a review of the current data mining techniques used therein.

Keywords

Healthcare Healthcare coding Upcoding Fraud and abuse Medicare Data mining 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. They would also like to thank various members of the Data Mining and Machine Learning Laboratory, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, for their assistance reviewing this manuscript.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Richard Bauder
    • 1
  • Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar
    • 1
  • Naeem Seliya
    • 2
  1. 1.College of Engineering and Computer ScienceFlorida Atlantic UniversityBoca RatonUSA
  2. 2.Health Safety Technologies, LLCMonticelloUSA

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