Batch Electronic Claims Submission

Batch billing refers to the electronic creation and transmission of several claims in a group. Batch billing systems usually extract information from an automated accounting or patient billing system to create a group of claim transactions. Claims may be transmitted from the provider's office or sent through a billing vendor or clearinghouse.

All batch claim submission software must be tested and approved by the Department’s fiscal agent.

Any entity sending electronic transactions through the fiscal agent’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Gateway for processing where reports and responses will be delivered must complete an EDI enrollment package. This provides EDI Gateway the information necessary to assign a Logon Name, Logon ID, and Trading Partner ID, which are required to submit electronic transactions, including claims.

The X12N 837 Professional (837P), Institutional (837I), or Dental (837D) transaction data will be submitted to the EDI Gateway, which validates submission of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) X12N format(s). The TA1 Interchange Acknowledgement reports the syntactical analysis of the interchange header and trailer. If the data is corrupt or the trading partner relationship does not exist within the Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), the interchange will reject and a TA1 along with the data will be forwarded to the State Healthcare Clearinghouse (SHCH) Technical Support for review and follow-up with the sender. An X12N 999 Functional Acknowledgement is generated when a file that has passed the header and trailer check passes through the SHCH.

If the file contains syntactical error(s), the segment(s) and element(s) where the error(s) occurred will be reported. After validation, the SHCH will then return the X12N 835 Remittance Advice containing information related to payees, payers, dollar amount, and payments. These X12N transactions will be returned to the Web Portal for retrieval by the trading partner, following the standard claims processing cycle.

Testing and Vendor Certification 

Completion of the testing process must occur prior to submission of electronic batch claims to EDI Gateway. Assistance from EDI business analysts’ is available throughout this process. Each test transmission is inspected thoroughly to ensure no formatting errors are present. Testing is conducted to verify the integrity of the format, not the integrity of the data; however, in order to simulate a production environment, EDI requests that providers send real transmission data.

The number of required test transmissions depends on the number of format errors on a transmission and the relative severity of these errors. Additional testing may be required in the future to verify any changes made to the MMIS have not affected provider submissions. Also, changes to the ANSI formats may require additional testing.

In order to expedite testing, EDI Gateway requires providers to submit all X12N test transactions to Edifecs prior to submitting them to EDI Gateway.