Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Service Degraded

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hello BCDA Users,

We've identified a service disruption that began yesterday, March 3rd, 2026, around 10 PM Eastern Time. When making $export requests to the /Patient and /Group endpoints of the production API (api.bcda.cms.gov), some jobs may fail.

We are investigating the root cause of this issue, and will share more details as we work to resolve this issue.

We apologize for any disruption this may have caused. Please don't hesitate to reach out to our team at bc...@cms.hhs.gov if you have any questions.

Thanks,
The BCDA Team

[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hello BCDA Users,

We've identified the root cause of the issue as a large number of Medicare Enrollees who have recently received new Medicare Beneficiary Identifiers (MBIs).

It can typically take a few days for CMS systems to fully populate with the new identifier for an enrollee, and BCDA will normally include an operation outcome error for the individual enrollee's data. Due to the large number of recent MBI changes, some jobs exceeded a threshold for enrollees with missing data, causing BCDA to mark the job as failed due to numerous errors.

We are temporarily removing this threshold to allow you to resume downloading Medicare claims data from BCDA, though you may see more operation outcome errors than normal as CMS systems are updated with the new MBIs for these enrollees.

We apologize for any disruption this may have caused. Please don't hesitate to reach out to our team at bc...@cms.hhs.gov if you have any questions.

Thank you,
The BCDA Team

[Samuel Wang]

Hi BCDA team,

Thanks for the update! I just wanted to get more clarity about the removal of the threshold, could it potentially cause any degradation on the quality of the data?

Best reagards,

Samuel 

On Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 12:20:04 PM UTC-5 Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community wrote:

Hello BCDA Users,

We've identified the root cause of the issue as a large number of Medicare Enrollees who have recently received new Medicare Beneficiary Identifiers (MBIs).

It can typically take a few days for CMS systems to fully populate with the new identifier for an enrollee, and BCDA will normally include an operation outcome error for the individual enrollee's data. Due to the large number of recent MBI changes, some jobs exceeded a threshold for enrollees with missing data, causing BCDA to mark the job as failed due to numerous errors.

We are temporarily removing this threshold to allow you to resume downloading Medicare claims data from BCDA, though you may see more operation outcome errors than normal as CMS systems are updated with the new MBIs for these enrollees.

We apologize for any disruption this may have caused. Please don't hesitate to reach out to our team at bc...@cms.hhs.gov if you have any questions.

Thank you,
The BCDA Team

On Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 9:43:28 AM UTC-5 Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community wrote:

Hello BCDA Users,

We've identified a service disruption that began yesterday, March 3rd, 2026, around 10 PM Eastern Time. When making $export requests to the /Patient and /Group endpoints of the production API (api.bcda.cms.gov), some jobs may fail.

We are investigating the root cause of this issue, and will share more details as we work to resolve this issue.

We apologize for any disruption this may have caused. Please don't hesitate to reach out to our team at bc...@cms.hhs.gov if you have any questions.

Thanks,
The BCDA Team

Samuel   Wang ​​​​ Software Engineer II (647) 994‑5133 |  samue...@pearlhealth.com 244 Fifth Avenue, Suite #1846, New York, NY 10001 www.pearlhealth.com

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[Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) Community]

Hi folks,

While this error threshold is lifted, you may see a large number of OperationOutcome errors for your completed jobs.

When you make a request to check the status of a job that has completed, you may find a large number of OperationOutcome files in the response's error array. 

When downloading the OperationOutcome files, you'll find they contain the errors indicating the newly minted MBIs of your organization's enrollees which are still being populated across CMS systems. 

Example OperationOutcome with a redacted MBI:

{ "issue": [ { "code": "not-found", "diagnostics": "Error retrieving BlueButton ID for cclfBeneficiary MBI REDACTED", "severity": "error" } ], "resourceType": "OperationOutcome" }

The recent MBI changes will have no impact on the data successfully returned by BCDA and included in the output array of the response. Claim, ClaimResponse, Coverage, Patient, or ExplanationOfBenefit resources available to download from your successful job requests

Thanks,
The BCDA Team