CMS on Oct. 1 moved up the deadline for all hospital and health care organizations to transition to the National Provider Identifier on Medicare claims from May 23, 2008, to Jan. 1, 2008, Healthcare IT News reports.
According to a CMS e-mail, hospitals that fail to submit an NPI in the primary fields on Medicare fee-for-service institutional claims beginning Jan. 1, 2008, will have their claims returned as unprocessable.
CMS said it moved up the deadline because most providers have successfully transitioned to the NPI, which "has been in successful operation for all institutional provider claims since June 2007."
CMS has not issued a similar new deadline for professional claims forms, and most physicians, clinics and labs who use those claims still are expected to transition to NPI by May 23, 2008.
However, doctors should prepare for the possibility of an earlier deadline, according to Martin Jensen, COO and chief analyst for Healthcare IT Transition Group. Jensen said the new deadline highlights the fact that the NPI contingency announced by CMS last spring was not a 12-month compliance delay, but rather a 12-month transition. The open-ended transitions cost the industry too much money and make it difficult for health organizations to focus on their next project, he said.
Providers can continue to submit NPI/legacy pairs, although claims with only a legacy provider identifier for the primary fields will be returned to them as unprocessable, according to the CMS notice. The agency recommended that providers using both NPI and legacy claims for reimbursement test a small sample of claims only using NPI (Manos, Healthcare IT News, 10/9).