What are the five valid service location indicators?

The ministry names HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP as the five valid SLI codes for hospital diagnostic service billing. The conditions tie HIP to an admission date requirement, which is why V66 and V67 exist for that code specifically.

How is V62 different from V64?

V62 means an indicator was present and was not one of the five accepted values. V64 means the indicator was missing. Both reject the claim, but the correction differs: one replaces a wrong value and the other supplies an absent one.

Why did every diagnostic claim from one site reject with V62?

Because the indicator is almost always stored as a default rather than chosen per claim. When the stored value does not match the setting, it fails identically on every claim from that site until the configuration is corrected.

Can a V62 claim be recovered after three months?

If the original claim reached the Claims Error Report inside three months of the service date, INFOBulletin 230402 allows a corrected resubmission through the ministry stale-date process after the window closes. If it was never submitted in time, recovery runs through a written application instead.

OHIP error report

V62

Hospital and emergency equivalent

OHIP error code V62: invalid service location indicator on a hospital diagnostic claim

V62 means a diagnostic service billed from a participating hospital physician or group carried a service location indicator that is not one of the five the ministry accepts. The accepted set is HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP.

Ministry wording: Invalid service location indicator. Most often affects Internal medicine, Neurology, Hospitalists, Orthopaedic surgery.

You already know V62. A single rejection is rarely the whole pile. Specialists we work with recover $10,000 to $100,000+ from rejected and unpaid claims, then average a 20–40% revenue increase within 90 days.

Each minute looking this up is about $5 of clinic time.

1Why it fires
2What it costs
3What you can recover

See what you can recover

V62 at a glance

V62 is a V-series validation edit, so the claim is rejected on the Claims Error Report and never reaches the Remittance Advice as a paid or adjusted item. The ministry condition is specific about the circumstance: a hospital diagnostic service billing from a participating hospital physician or group where the service location indicator is not one of the five valid SLI codes.

The service location indicator tells the ministry where a diagnostic service happened. That matters because the same diagnostic listing can be payable at a different amount, or not payable at all, depending on the setting. A physician reading a tracing in a hospital out-patient department and a physician reading the same tracing elsewhere are not making the same claim.

V62 is the first of six codes that police this one field and its two companions. V64 is the indicator missing entirely. V65 is a valid indicator with no master number. V66 and V67 are the admission date missing under HIP. V68 is a master number and admission date present under an indicator other than HIP. Reading V62 as a general hospital billing problem rather than as a wrong value in one field sends the correction in the wrong direction.

Why it fires

The claim carries a service location indicator outside the accepted set of HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP.
The billing is a hospital diagnostic service from a participating hospital physician or group, which is the circumstance in which the ministry applies this edit.
The EMR or billing software defaults every diagnostic claim to one indicator regardless of where the service happened.
A retired or non-hospital indicator is still stored against the site or the listing.

The ministry condition names the five accepted codes explicitly, so V62 is a membership test rather than a judgement. A value either belongs to that set or it does not. There is no partial credit for an indicator that is close to correct.

The practical cause in most groups is a default. Diagnostic billing is high volume and repetitive, so the setting is configured once and then inherited. When a group starts billing from a second site, or an existing site changes how it classifies encounters, the inherited default stops matching reality and every claim from that site fails the same way.

A retired indicator is the other recurring cause. The ministry maintains V73 separately for an OTN service location indicator that is no longer active, which is a useful reminder that this field has history. An indicator that was accepted in a previous era and is still sitting in a template will not be accepted now because it was once.

Because the edit applies to the hospital diagnostic circumstance, the same indicator can be wrong on one claim and irrelevant on another. Plausibility is the wrong test. The question is whether this particular diagnostic service, billed from this particular participating hospital physician or group, carried one of the five.

What it costs

The claim is rejected in full. Nothing is paid until a corrected claim is accepted, and the amount at risk is the entire fee for the diagnostic service rather than a reduction.

V62 does not pay a lesser amount in the same cycle. The item leaves the payment run, so a practice that does not work the error report loses the whole professional or technical fee for that service.

The exposure is volume rather than unit value. Diagnostic services are repetitive by nature, so a misconfigured indicator does not reject one claim. It rejects every claim from that site until someone notices, which is why these codes appear as a column of identical lines on one report rather than as isolated errors.

Services rendered on or after 1 April 2023 carry a three-month submission window from the date of service, per ministry INFOBulletin 230402. A repeating configuration error that nobody reads can age a full quarter of diagnostic billing out of the electronic window while every individual claim was correctable on the day it rejected.

Step-by-step: how to clear this rejection

Read the Claims Error Report line and confirm the code is V62 rather than V64, V65, V66, V67 or V68, because each points at a different field.
Identify the indicator the claim actually carried and compare it against the accepted set of HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP.
Establish where the diagnostic service was performed, so the replacement indicator describes the real setting rather than the convenient one.
Check whether the corrected indicator brings a companion requirement with it, because HIP also requires an admission date and all five require a master number.
Resubmit the corrected claim inside the three-month window, and count how many other claims on the report carry the same indicator.

Correct the field, then look at the pattern. A single V62 is a typing error. A column of them is a configuration that will keep producing rejections after this batch is cleared, and the second resubmission costs the same staff time as the first.

Resist the temptation to cycle through the five accepted codes until one is accepted. An indicator that passes validation while describing the wrong setting is a claim that is now wrong in a way the ministry will not catch at submission, which is a worse position than a rejection.

Record the indicator you submitted and the date. Where a correction is driven by a site or template change, the date tells you which claims went out before the fix and therefore which still need working.

Money you already earned, still unpaid

Recovery is separate work from ongoing billing. Charging only a percentage of what we recover, we review the backlog, correct what your documentation supports, and resubmit. Recent engagements have recovered five- and six-figure amounts, including rejected claims well past the 3-month stale dated deadline going back into 2023.

The alternative is usually your evenings or admin blocks, not billable clinic time. No setup or service fees. Every dollar recovered is money already written off, you keep most of it, and you pay nothing if nothing comes back.

“These claims weren’t chased up on. These claims have been stale dated. You add up the volume of money in there and it’s a consequential sum.”

Dr Sanjay Acharya, on what the recovery review found

Show me what is still recoverable

How to fix it going forward

Store the service location indicator against the site where the diagnostic service is performed, not against the billing provider or the fee schedule code.
Review the stored indicator whenever the group starts billing from a new hospital site or changes how a site is classified.
Validate that the indicator sits inside the accepted set of HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP before the claim file is built.
Read the error report weekly, because this cluster fails in batches and a weekly cadence catches a configuration error inside the submission window.

The durable control is where the value lives. An indicator attached to a site changes when the site changes. An indicator attached to a provider or a listing survives every change and quietly stops being true.

Treat a new site as a billing event rather than an administrative one. The first week of claims from a new hospital location is where this cluster concentrates, and it is cheap to check twenty claims deliberately before four hundred reject.

Weekly review matters more for this cluster than for most. These are configuration errors, so they do not arrive one at a time. The gap between a weekly and a monthly cadence is the difference between losing a handful of claims and losing a quarter of diagnostic billing.

Is it recoverable?

Recoverable by resubmission inside the window

Replace the indicator with the one that describes where the service was actually performed, satisfy any companion requirement it brings, and resubmit inside the three-month window from the date of service.

A V62 that reached the Claims Error Report inside three months of the service date is a routine correction. The indicator was wrong, the setting is a matter of record, and the corrected claim stands on its own.

INFOBulletin 230402 also allows claims that reached the Claims Error Report inside three months to be corrected and resubmitted through the ministry stale-date process after the three-month window has closed. The error report line is the evidence that the claim was submitted on time, which is the reason an unread report is more expensive than a worked one.

Where a claim was never submitted inside the window at all, payment may still be recoverable by written application where the documentation supports it. That is a different process from a corrected resubmission, and this page does not set out how such an application is prepared.

For in-province services on or after 1 April 2023, claims must be submitted within three months of the date of service, not six. Ontario INFOBulletin 230402 is the Ministry notice. Many third-party pages still quote six months. That window is closed for current work. If the original claim reached the Claims Error Report inside three months, a corrected resubmission can still be filed after the window in the Ministry's stale-date process. If the claim was never submitted in time, payment may be recoverable by written application. That is not a routine resubmit.

Related codes

Frequently asked questions

What does OHIP error code V62 mean?: V62 means a diagnostic service billed from a participating hospital physician or group carried a service location indicator outside the five the ministry accepts. The accepted set is HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP.
What are the five valid service location indicators?: The ministry names HDS, HED, HIP, HOP and HRP as the five valid SLI codes for hospital diagnostic service billing. The conditions tie HIP to an admission date requirement, which is why V66 and V67 exist for that code specifically.
How is V62 different from V64?: V62 means an indicator was present and was not one of the five accepted values. V64 means the indicator was missing. Both reject the claim, but the correction differs: one replaces a wrong value and the other supplies an absent one.
Why did every diagnostic claim from one site reject with V62?: Because the indicator is almost always stored as a default rather than chosen per claim. When the stored value does not match the setting, it fails identically on every claim from that site until the configuration is corrected.
Can a V62 claim be recovered after three months?: If the original claim reached the Claims Error Report inside three months of the service date, INFOBulletin 230402 allows a corrected resubmission through the ministry stale-date process after the window closes. If it was never submitted in time, recovery runs through a written application instead.

References

For how error reports relate to the remittance advice, see how to read your OHIP remittance advice and what rejection codes actually mean. Official wording for this code: Ministry of Health, Error Report Rejection Conditions (December 2022).