← All glossary termsCoverage Requirements Discovery (CRD)
The process of determining, before a claim or request is submitted, whether a specific service requires prior authorization and what payer-specific rules apply.
What it means
CRD prevents wasted effort on requests that don't need prior authorization at all, and flags exactly which rules apply to the ones that do. It's one of the three ePA API criteria codified under HTI-4, alongside documentation templates and submission tracking. Ethermed's CATCH step performs this function automatically at the front of the workflow, rather than leaving it to manual lookup.
