Non-standard Medicare-HICN's causing parsing errors?

[Rodger Perry]

We have an application that successfully creates a CMS-ready Excel upload file for our users to load through the CMS web interface. However, we have encountered "parse errors" when attempting to upload if we include patient records that contain non-standard Medicare HICN's. 

The majority of patients uploaded to our system have standard 10/11 digit HICN's (plus optional alpha-character suffix if required). But we are seeing a small number of HICN's that BEGIN with an alpha character. Example:

A1234567890

..where the alpha characters run through the alphabet as far as "G".  So far, when my clients - who are currently uploading files - encounter a "parsing error", I review their files, ask them to remove the rows with non-standard HICN's - and the files upload with no parse errors.

Question: are there restrictions on the HICN? The CMS data dictionary does not extensively detail the requirements. Further, these HICN's appear to be coming out of the CMS database, so we're wondering whether there is a problem with the import process?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rodger Perry

Senior Software Engineer

Lightbeam Health Solutions

www.lightbeamhealth.com

[Sarah White]

Hi Rodger,

My apologies for a delayed response. Could you submit this question to the Quality Payment Program Service Center at Q...@cms.hhs.gov? It will get routed to the appropriate team for support there. Thanks!