CollaborateMD, a leading provider of Internet medical billing software for physician offices, hospitalists and medical billing services, has shown full compliance with Medicare’s mandatory National Provider Identifier (NPI) requirement well in advance of the May 23rd deadline. As of last week, an NPI is required for all HIPAA standard transactions, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The new requirement posed two distinct challenges for the healthcare industry. First, software vendors needed to integrate the NPI requirement into their solution quickly, and without claim rejections. Second, providers filing electronic claims with any payer had to follow proper channels to receive their unique identifier in time to meet the May deadline.

To mitigate the first of these two challenges, the CollaborateMD development team enhanced their medical billing software in 2006 to comply with the NPI mandate. By fall of 2007, they were successfully testing claims. As of April, 2008, 99% of all claims were processed with the NPI.

Working in tandem with their internal customer support department, CollaborateMD implementation specialists moved quickly to ensure their customers properly filed with NPPES to receive an identifier. Focused on proactively managing this industry-wide change, CollaborateMD assisted their customers in making the required transition well in advance of the cut-off date.

“Anticipating the complexity of this new requirement has undoubtedly paid off for our customers,” stated Douglas Kegler, CollaborateMD president & CEO. “Our team, strengthened by the immense support we received from RelayHealth, worked quickly and effectively to be one of the first practice management software providers to report such high compliance. Our customers know we are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to expedite the payer payment process.”