Physicians in New Jersey are not bound by the two-year statute of limitations for payment of services rendered to employees under the state’s workers compensation system.

In Plastic Surgery Center v. Malouf Chevrolet-Cadillac,Inc., the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, in Jersey City, New Jersey, held Thursday the state legislature’s 2012 modification of the New Jersey Workers Compensation Act did not intend to apply a two-year statute of limitations to medical provider claims.

In the lawsuit, a group of medical providers filed petitions in the New Jersey Division of Workers Compensation for payment of services rendered to employees more than two years from the date of the employee’s accident but less than six years from the claim’s accrual. A compensation judge dismissed their claims, holding that they were barred by the two-year statute of limitations. The medical providers appealed the decision.

In 2012, the New Jersey legislature amended a statute to grant the state’s workers comp division the exclusive jurisdiction over claims brought medical providers for payment of services rendered to injured employees. However, the change did not expressly state how the timeliness of medical provider claims would be determined. Prior to that change, medical providers were entitled to file a collection action of payment for services in superior court and had no obligation to participate in a patient’s pending compensation action.

The appellate court held that the legislature’s likely intent in modifying the statue was to formally move medical provider claims to the division, and found that its decision to not express that the Act’s two-year time bar would apply to medical provider claims “is alone persuasive of its more likely intent to leave things as they were” with provider claims falling under general six-year statute of limitations.

The court further found that the Act’s two-year time bar “doesn’t fit,” holding that tying the timeliness of a medical provider’s claim to the passage of time from an employee’s accident “seems nonsensical” because there would be “numerous times in which the window within which medical providers would be required to assert their claims would expire before their claims accrued.”

The court, therefore, reversed the judgment dismissing the claims as untimely and remanded the case.