bn106 834 file format woes

The BN106 produces a flat file that does not include the appropriate field and record delimters or the Header and Trailer segments required by the HIPAA 834 specification. There are many ways to manipulate the file into the correct format, but the most effective would be a mapping utility such as Mercator/Ascential. This will require either a programmer or a very technical HRIS professional. Other considerations: most Carriers' standard delivery method is ftp with PGP encryption. Your IT department will need to assist with this. If you'd like more information, feel free to contact me directly: kcoate@collegeboard.org

Beverly,

I would suggest to have your programmers do these interface files using 4GL (cobol) programming. Here's our scenario:
1. We have several interfaces sent to what you call benefit vendors including insurance carriers etc. There are daily, weekly and
monthly activities. Accordingly, we created cobol programs by these frequencies and create several work files(csv or sequential).
2. These work files also have it's own trigger files created and used by BCI's ScanFileClient(we don't want to send any empty files).
3. These work files are sent to a repository for encryptuion then ftped to the vendors.
4. Email are also sent to the vendors to trigger their ftp sites.

Here's a brief example: We have a program for a weekly interface to three different insurance companies.
1. The companies will give us their file specs and based on that spec, we created the work files.
2. The program will output three different files. If there records for each file then a corresponding trigger file is created.
3. These trigger file will then activate a ScanfileClient and calls a script that will sent the file to the repository for encryption,
ftp the file to the insurance company then sent an email.

All of these are done without manual intervention. Above example uses the follwoing tables(as I remembered): BENEFITS, EMPLOYEE,
PAEMPLOYEE,EMDEPEND and HRDEPBEN.