Changes to Rate Limits and EOB File Size

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hi BCDA Users,

Effective today, BCDA will decrease the number of EOB resources per ndjson file from 200 EOB resources to 50. We are making this change to address recent performance concerns shared by the community and to decrease the time to complete long-running jobs.

Along with this change, BCDA will increase the rate limit on API requests by 10x to accommodate the additional EOB files.

What's changing?

• The number of EOB resources per ndjson file is decreasing from 200 resources per file to 50 resources per file. As a result, expect approximately 4x the number of EOB files per job request.
• BCDA is increasing its rate limit by 10x. From a max of 300 requests / 5 minutes to 3000 requests / 5 minutes from a single IP address.

Why is it changing?

• The change in EOB file size will decrease the time it takes BCDA to complete long-running jobs like requests for historical data (without the _since parameter).
• The API rate limit increase will help allow your API clients to download the increased number of EOB files with a lower likelihood of having your requests throttled by BCDA.

What can you do to prepare?

• No action is required, but you may wish to revisit our guidance on handling 429 errors caused by exceeding the API rate limit.

Thanks,
The BCDA Team