UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Indiana ABA coverage (Hoosier Care Connect + PathWays for Aging).

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: ABA is covered for members 20 years of age and younger. Effective April 1, 2026 coverage runs exclusively through EPSDT, and for dates of service on or after October 1, 2026 IHCP will not authorize or reimburse ABA for members 21 and older — a state policy that binds every MCE.^[4][3][5]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: a CDE more than one year old requires an updated statement of need, which must include a referral from an appropriate referring practitioner and an up-to-date behavior assessment completed by the ABA provider. Members continuing current services need no new CDE but do need an updated behavior assessment and treatment plan. A behavior assessment completed within the previous six months should be obtained from the original provider rather than repeated. IHCP states these documentation requirements apply to managed care as well as fee-for-service.^[5][4]

Indiana Medicaid policy sits first in UHC's own stated criteria hierarchy (state policy, then UHC policy, then InterQual), so the state list governs: the CDE must be performed by a doctoral-level licensed clinical psychologist endorsed as an HSPP, a licensed physician, a licensed APRN, or a licensed physician assistant with specialized training in the current DSM autism criteria. Do not substitute Optum's national commercial criteria here — the carve-out supplies the rails, not the clinical standard.^[5][1]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: the behavior assessment must include the Vineland Comprehensive Parent Interview Form with the Maladaptive Behavior domain, the BASC Parenting Relationship Questionnaire and an age-appropriate objective direct skills assessment, with the complete scoring report, outcome measure scores and graphs submitted with the PA; only BASC-4 satisfies the requirement after October 1, 2026. Requests are submitted on Optum's ABA Treatment Request Form from the Provider Express Indiana Medicaid ABA Program page, or by faxing the IHCP universal PA form to (844) 897-6514.^[4][6][1][2]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: a physician must make a treatment referral recommending ABA therapy, and the CDE’s own required components include a physician’s referral for autism-specific services. Prior authorization is required on top of the referral for every ABA service, through this plan rather than through Acentra Health.^[4][5]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: effective April 1, 2026, codes 97151, 97152, 97153, 97154 and 0373T can no longer be billed with telehealth modifier 95 and require in-person delivery. The plan publishes no ABA telehealth policy of its own.^[3]

Indiana law sets the binding clock, and it is far faster than the federal one. Since July 1, 2025, IC 27-1-37.5-23 requires a utilization review entity to answer an urgent PA request “not later than twenty-four (24) hours after receiving the request” and every other request “not later than forty-eight (48) hours,” with “weekends and state and federal legal holidays” excluded from both clocks; the chapter's “health plan” expressly includes “the Medicaid risk based managed care program” (IC 27-1-37.5-5), and IC 27-1-37.5-28 makes a missed deadline an automatic approval: the service “shall be automatically deemed authorized.” The federal managed-care floor, 42 CFR 438.210(d), is only a ceiling for states (7 calendar days standard for rating periods starting on or after 1/1/2026, extendable 14 days; 72 hours expedited), so the stricter Indiana clock wins. UHC's own published numbers predate the statute and are slower: its 2024 IHCP Works deck lists non-urgent pre-service “Within 7 calendar days of receipt of medical record information required but no longer than 14 calendar days from receipt,” urgent within 48 hours and concurrent within 1 business day, and its Hoosier Care Connect Care Provider Manual (2024 edition) lists non-urgent within 5 calendar days, urgent 48 hours, concurrent 24 hours or next business day. Hold the plan (and Optum, which reviews its ABA) to the statute. No ABA reauthorization lead time is published for the Indiana Medicaid ABA program.^{[8][9][13][1][14][12]}

UHC Community Plan pays last: its Hoosier Care Connect manual says it “is, by law, the payer of last resort for eligible members. Therefore, you must bill and obtain an explanation of benefits (EOB) from any other insurance or health care coverage resource before billing,” then attach a complete copy of that EOB to the claim. Get this plan's ABA PA even when it is secondary: the IHCP Prior Authorization module says that when the member has primary coverage, the provider “must follow the primary insurer's requirements for obtaining PA and must also obtain PA from the appropriate IHCP PA contractor (based on the program assignment of the member) to receive payment from the IHCP for the balance of charges not paid by the primary insurance.” The UHC manual publishes nothing different on PA-when-secondary, and the IHCP TPL module adds that IHCP will not pay for services the primary denied as out-of-network, so be in the commercial plan's network. TRICARE is not a problem here: 32 CFR 199.8 excludes Medicaid from the “double coverage plans” TRICARE pays after, so for a child with both, TRICARE pays before Medicaid.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: ABA performed by a BCaBA or credentialed RBT must be under the direct supervision of a BCBA, BCBA-D or HSPP, and since April 1, 2026 at least 1 hour of BCBA (or IHCP-approved qualifying clinician) supervision is required per 8 hours of technician-delivered therapy. Behavior assessments may only be performed by a psychologist, BCBA-D or master's-level BCBA. IHCP states that its ABA documentation requirements apply to both fee-for-service and managed care, and this plan publishes no supervision standard of its own.^[4][3][5]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid limits: up to 40 hours per week may be requested with anything beyond that needing an additional PA; each prior authorization is capped at six months; and since April 1, 2026 comprehensive ABA (16+ hours/week, modifier UA) draws from a 4,000-hour (16,000-unit) lifetime allocation per member, with 97155 and 97156 excluded and targeted ABA (≤15 hours/week) exempt. No per-day MUE ceiling is published at either level.^[4][3]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: the treatment plan must be built around the member's school attendance (including homeschooling) and other daily activities, while services focusing solely on recreational or educational outcomes are not covered, and neither are services duplicative of an IEP that address the same goals using the same techniques as the treatment plan.^[4]

Follows the Indiana Medicaid rule: ABA rendered by a BCaBA or RBT must be billed under the NPI of an IHCP-enrolled ABA therapist or school corporation, on a professional claim. Since July 1, 2025 the rendering practitioner must be enrolled under ABA specialty 615, 624 or 625, and since April 1, 2025 the rendering NPI must align with the credential-level modifier (U1 RBT / U2 BCaBA / U3 BCBA-HSPP). Plan-level claim formatting may still differ — MCEs publish their own billing requirements.^[4][3]

Not published by Indiana Medicaid or by this plan. IHCP is explicit that within managed care “individual managed care entities (MCEs) establish and publish their own billing and reimbursement requirements,” so unlike the clinical criteria, code-pair rules are not inherited from the state by default.^[5]

Ask the plan: The MCE directly — ask whether 97155 pays alongside 97153 for the same clock time, and request the plan's billing and reimbursement requirements in writing.

Neither Indiana Medicaid nor this plan publishes a session-note signature rule. The state's published signature requirements attach to the plan documents — the behavior assessment and the treatment plan must each be signed by the lead analyst and the parent or guardian — and BT202562, the bulletin titled for ABA documentation requirements, does not reach the individual session note. IHCP states its documentation requirements apply to managed care as well as fee-for-service, but also that MCEs establish and publish their own billing and reimbursement requirements, so the gap is not automatically filled at the state level.^[4][5]

Ask the plan: The MCE directly — ask for its ABA documentation and session-note standard in writing. BT202562 also promises a future bulletin clarifying documentation requirements under the updated ABA State Plan Amendment; check for it before relying on this.