Clarification on Blue Cross inpatient authorization requirements for newborns

Only sick newborns—not well babies—require inpatient admission authorization from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Since newborns take a few days to get added to their parent's health care coverage, and since the e-referral application doesn't allow for temporary requests until the sick baby has coverage, sick newborn inpatient admission authorization requests should be submitted by fax. Use the Acute Inpatient Fax Assessment Form to submit the request for patients with Blue Cross commercial PPO coverage. If the baby is not yet named, you can use "Baby Boy" or "Baby Girl" or, in the case of multiple births, "Baby Boy 1", "Baby Boy 2" as the baby's first name.

Our October Record article, Here's what you need to know about Blue Cross inpatient authorization requirements, initially caused some confusion. It listed newborn and gender assignment authorization requests as the only exceptions to using e-referral for submitting Blue Cross inpatient admission authorization requests. We should have said that only sick newborns and gender assignment require inpatient authorization via fax. We updated our October article to clarify this. We apologize for the confusion.

Posted: October 2017
Line of business: Blue Cross