Request for BFD field/schema update notes (recent and ongoing)

[Jake Halpert]

Hi BCDA Team -

Hope you're doing well.

Our data ingestion team noticed a schema change in the BFD server's production EOB resources starting to appear in the last 1-2 weeks and pertaining to at least one field. (The change is consistent in both BCDA and DPC delivered payloads; and detail on the specific change that raised this ticket request is below for your reference.) 

Changes in field or system population can cause breaking changes to client ingestion, since pipelines are generally trained to look in certain spots of the payload for certain variables.

Are you able to get a list of all recent schema changes made in the BFD production server in the last ~2 weeks? We are now doing a differential review on our end of recent vs prior EOB resources returned by the BFD server,  to see if there are other fields/usage that BFD has changed recently, but it would be a big help if you could provide a sort of "release notes" of any changes they made to field or system mappings recently in case we miss something. Also we would advocate for ongoing update notices in kind, which would be a great standard to set as the ecosystem grows and matures.

We applaud the ongoing evolution and improvements and encourage this continuous improvement/speed -- which we believe the BFD/BCDA/DPC team continues is leading the market in across all payer teams to date actually -- we just recommend highly that at least wrt schema updates, a delineated list of changes be communicated on (or leading up to) release (not version to version updates eg R3->R4->R5, but updated schema usage within a given version which can sometimes go undetected by clients for some time if not disclosed). 

Change Detail referenced above:

• INPATIENT and SNF ExplanationOfBenefit Resources
  • Admission Type Code item change from
    • before change:
      • supportingInfo.category.code.coding.system=https://bluebutton.cms.gov/resources/variables/clm_ip_admsn_type_cd
    • after change:
      • supportingInfo.category.code.coding.system=https://www.nubc.org/CodeSystem/PriorityTypeOfAdmitOrVisit

Thank you as always!

Jake

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hi Jake,

We're deeply sorry for the disruption to your pipeline this unannounced change caused. As with changes to the behavior of BCDA's endpoints, we aim to provide advanced notice of changes to the schema and recommended steps on how you can prepare.

We had originally identified an opportunity to make this improvement to EOB resources when adding the Admission Type Codes to Claim resources (available to REACH ACOs only) earlier this year, but failed to create a separate announcement for the planned changes to EOB resources.

We appreciate your summary of the changes to EOB resources' Admission Type Codes and wanted to inform you of another recent change: this one for the EOB resources' Revenue Center NDC Quantity Qualifier Code in the same July 10th release:

Revenue Center NDC Quantity Qualifier Code item changes

• Before July 10th 2024:
  • item[N].modifier[N].coding[N].system = 'https://bluebutton.cms.gov/resources/variables/rev_cntr_ndc_qty_qlfr_cd'
• After July 10th 2024:
  • item[N].modifier[N].coding[N].system = 'http://unitsofmeasure.org'

Not communicating these changes to EOB resources was an oversight and again, we apologize for the disruption it may have caused.

Thanks,
The BCDA Team

[Jake Halpert]

Thank you so much  as always for this rapid response + guidance. Also thank you for linking again to the BFD Git repo, we will bookmark that for future self-checking as a first step (we had only saved the BCDA git repo prior). 

Closing the ticket now and resolving our internal review process since these are the only two changes, and updating our production ingestion accordingly.

Code on!

Jake

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