Enrollment to Medicare

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Standard Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Enrollment Form must be completed prior to submitting electronic media claims (EMC) or other EDI transactions to Medicare.

The form with details where it should be mailed to : http://www.cms.hhs.gov/cmsforms/downloads/cms855s.pdf

The agreement must be executed by each provider of health care services, physician, or supplier that intends to submit EMC or use EDI, either directly with Medicare or through a billing service or clearinghouse.

Each new EMC biller must sign the form and submit it to their local Medicare carrier, durable medical equipment regional carrier (DMERC), or fiscal intermediary.

An organization comprising of multiple components that have been assigned Medicare provider numbers, supplier numbers, or UPINs may elect to execute a single EDI Enrollment Form on behalf of the organizational components to which these numbers have been assigned. The organization as a whole is held responsible for the performance of its components.

Once the form is signed each biller gets a NPI (National Provider Identifier) that will be used for electronic transactions with CMS. 

ClinTrial from Phase Forward

I first heard about ClinTrial during my Masters and was lucky to have been part of their large healthcare project where ClinTrial was deployed. Over the past 8 years ClinTrial has undergone significant maturity and has gained market share around the world.

Basically ClinTrial is the Clinical data management system and is coupled to InForm which is their Integrated Trial Management (ITM) system. We did not see great differences in functionality between Oracle Clinical and ClinTrial, however ClinTrial is definetly advanced in terms of compliance with CDISC standards. The Web Submission Data Manager (WebSDM) application, developed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRDA) between the FDA and Phase Forward, has been in use at the FDA since 2004 and is now commercially available to the clinical data management community.

Another powerful application in the product family is LabPasCT. It was originally developed by Green Mountain Logic (GML), a process automation software company, and it provides powerful, easy-to-use, targeted solutions for the life sciences industry. It helps to automate the process of workflow management and sample management in Phase I clinical trials.