RARC N938: Do Not Resubmit — Claim Will Be Automatically Reprocessed
Informational alert: hold this claim — the payer has queued it for reprocessing on its own. Filing it again would create a duplicate and risk a duplicate-claim denial, so watch later remittances for the corrected result instead.
What Does RARC N938 Mean?
N938 is a direct instruction embedded in the remittance rather than a description of a payment problem. It tells the billing office that the payer has already identified this claim as needing further action on its end — a correction, a reprocessing cycle, or an internal adjustment — and that the payer's system will handle it without any resubmission from the provider. The claim isn't being closed out with a final answer at this point; it's being held for automatic follow-up.
This remark most often shows up when a payer has detected a systemic issue affecting a batch of claims (a pricing error, an eligibility file that needed correction, an internal processing glitch) and is working through a bulk reprocessing run rather than asking each provider to resubmit individually. Because the payer already has the claim queued for reprocessing, a new submission from the provider doesn't speed anything up — it creates a second, redundant version of the same claim in the payer's system.
The practical risk of ignoring this instruction is that the duplicate submission gets flagged and denied under a separate code, commonly a duplicate-claim CARC, which then requires its own explanation and cleanup. In other words, resubmitting in response to N938 doesn't just fail to help — it actively generates a new administrative problem layered on top of the one the payer was already resolving.
What to Do
Do not resubmit the claim. Log the claim as pending payer-initiated reprocessing and set a follow-up reminder to check subsequent remittances rather than taking any submission action in the meantime. Since the payer isn't giving a firm timeline in the remark itself, use your normal aging/follow-up cadence for held claims rather than escalating immediately.
When the reprocessed remittance does arrive, reconcile it against the original claim to confirm the outcome — a corrected payment, an adjustment, or a new determination — and close out the account accordingly. If a reasonable amount of time passes with no reprocessed remittance appearing, it's appropriate to contact the payer directly to check status, but the follow-up channel should be a status inquiry, not a resubmitted claim.
Common Scenarios
- A payer identifies a system-wide pricing error affecting a group of claims processed the same week and flags the affected claims with N938 while it runs a bulk correction.
- A billing office, unaware of the alert's meaning, resubmits a claim carrying N938 and receives a new denial for a duplicate claim on the resubmission, creating extra rework.
- A claim is held for reprocessing after a retroactive eligibility correction on the payer's side, and N938 tells the provider the corrected remittance will follow without any action needed from the practice.
- A billing team sets a 30-day follow-up reminder after seeing N938, and when no reprocessed remittance appears by then, contacts the payer for a status update rather than resubmitting the claim.
Commonly Paired With
No common pairings documented yet.