Notice of Updates to the Data in BCDA V2

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hello BCDA Community,

The BCDA team would like to share the following updates made by our upstream data partners as of Thursday, 1 September 2022. These are updates to the data in an effort to continuously work toward CARIN compliance.

(1) CARIN conformant Diagnosis Codes were added to the Diagnosis Coding list element in BCDA V2

• Diagnosis Codes in the value set 'Diagnosis Codes - International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM)' were added to the Diagnosis Coding list element; therefore, each Eob.diagnosis.diagnosisCodeableConcept should now have two coding entries:
  1. The existing coding with url of http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/icd-10
  2. A new, additional coding with system url of http://hl7.org.fhir/sid/icd-10-cm. Please note that this new entry should have the same diagnosis code as the previous entry in the "code" attribute. 

(2) CARIN conformant Procedure Codes were added in the Procedure Coding list element in BCDA V2

• Procedure Codes in the value set 'Procedure Codes - International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) - ICD-10 Procedure Coding System' were added in the Procedure Coding list element; therefore, each Eob.procedure.procedureCodeableConcept should now have two coding entries:
  1. The existing coding with url of http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/icd-10
  2. A new, additional coding with system url of http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10. Please note that this new entry should have the same procedure code as the previous entry in the "code" attribute.

Codings (of a diagnosis or a procedure) are list elements, meaning there can be more than one coding. To work towards CARIN conformance, we added a second coding to the list. The original coding is still there in an effort to reduce breaking changes for customers.

Please note that ICD version indicators are not expected to change frequently, as it would be dictated by industry modifications such as but not limited to the country moving to ICD-11 or updates to the CARIN Implementation Guide.

The data is updated in all BCDA requests as of the aforementioned release date. In order to receive these updates, BCDA customers are encouraged not to use the _since parameter for the next request to ensure all of the historical data is updated with these additions. 

We are focused on re-evaluating and refining how we announce various types of announcements, so that customers can better plan or anticipate behavior change(s).

Thank you for your continued support of the API!

The BCDA Team