Short-pay.
A bill the payer paid — for less than you billed, without denying it. The most expensive kind of underpayment, because nothing about it announces itself.
Paid, but not paid in full.
A short-pay is a line the payer processed and paid at less than the amount billed. It is not a denial and it is not a rejection. The bill went through. The money is simply light.
Three causes account for most of them. A rate difference — the payer used a different fee-schedule year, or a different level. A unit difference — hours converted into tenths wrongly on one side or the other. And an authorization difference — the payer trimmed to what it had approved.
It is small, it is quiet, and it compounds.
What four short-paid lines a week come to in a year. Nobody denied any of them.
A $16.14 gap on one line is not worth an evening. Four a week is 208 across a year — $3,357 — which on a book that bills $3,100–$3,600 a week is a full week of billings you already earned, documented and delivered.
The reason short-pays go uncaught is arithmetic, not diligence. Catching them means comparing every paid line to every billed line, on every remittance, for every claimant on a check that covers a dozen of them. Nobody does that reliably by hand at 9 p.m., and the payer has no incentive to correct an error in its own favor that nobody has raised.
When you do catch one, rebill with the original bill and the EOR attached, inside your state’s filing clock.
Related pages.
See short-pay recovery for what automatic line-level comparison looks like, or run one remittance through the free short-pay calculator first.
EOR · Fee schedule · Unit
See your own week run itself.
We load your state’s codes before the call, so you are looking at a caseload like yours inside the first two minutes — not a slide deck.