Under the policy change, Aetna will give medical necessity designation to noninvasive prenatal testing that measures cell-free fetal nucleic acids in maternal blood. The testing is used to screen for fetal aneuploidy, a condition that occurs when a fetus has one or more extra or missing chromosomes.
The coverage change falls in line with other national payers like UnitedHealthcare and Humana, who recently began covering noninvasive prenatal testing for average-risk pregnancies, according to GenomeWeb.
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