July 22, 2008
Highmark Medicare Services is pleased to be able to notify you that the SIPP I Part B workload transition from TrailBlazer for the states/locale of Maryland, Delaware, and District of Columbia Metropolitan Area is now complete.
In both of the J12 Transition Newsletters, Highmark Medicare Services identified differences between our business models in order to communicate possible impacts to you and to help you successfully prepare for the transition. Among the changes were new Customer Contact Center telephone numbers and hours of availability as well as new Post Office boxes for mailing documentation. We are pleased to report that we were ready to serve you at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 15, 2008, and began receiving telephone inquiries. New EDI Submitter and Login IDs needed for EDI billing did not provide any major issues on our first day of processing either. We do want to advise you that during this transition phase, we are experiencing a heavier call volume for both Provider Enrollment inquiries and the EDI Help Desk.
Another of the activities successfully completed was the control and transfer of the hard copies of in-process workloads (including claims, enrollment applications, appeals, and written inquiries) at the time of transition. The trucking company with which we contracted picked up the documents at the TrailBlazer facilities in Texas and Maryland during the dark day on July 11, 2008. All of the records forwarded by TrailBlazer were received in our Camp Hill location by July 14, 2008, and distributed to the appropriate functional departments to begin processing when the system became available on July 15, 2008.
With any transition, there are follow-up actions and issues that "shakeout" over the first week or two. One of these issues has dealt with generating first payments. Problems with the HIGLAS payment input were encountered on July 17, 2008, which prevented payments from being generated. IBM, the HIGLAS Maintainer, resolved the HIGLAS payment input problem on July 18, 2008; however, the corrected HIGLAS payment file did not make it into the MCS claims processing cycle at the Enterprise Data Center (EDC) that night. The July 21, 2008 MCS claims processing cycle included the HIGLAS payment inputs from July 14th through July 18th, and generated the first payments from Highmark Medicare Services for SIPP I.
In the event any other post-cutover issues surface, we will send an electronic message to you via our on-line listserv to advise you of the situation, the resolution, and any impact it may have to you.