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The Saga Continues — Why Now?
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The Saga Continues

by Bryan

Lambert at Corrente covers a significant problem with the web site: some of the 834 forms that are sent to insurance companies for enrollment in plans are corrupted.

The format for the 834 form was specified by the HIPAA law passed in the mid-1990s. They are one of the few things that really are an industry-wide standard. If this web site can’t consistently produce useable 834s, it is worthless.

What the form amounts to is a text file which contains all of the information that the insurance company needs to issue you a policy. If the file is corrupted and their software can’t read the data or the codes identifying the data, you don’t get insurance and have wasted your time on the web site.

This part of the process should have been an exercise in loading existing code on the server. All of the specifications are known. The only things missing were the web addresses for the insurance companies.

This sounds like a problem with verifying the data that is received to ensure it is ASCII text, and that is a front end problem. The other possibility is database corruption, but a problem with input is more likely.

2 comments

1 Badtux { 10.28.13 at 10:39 pm }

I wonder how many conversions between EBCDIC and ASCII are needed to move the data between the various computer systems, and what happens if you send EBCDIC to a computer that’s expecting ASCII. Not good things, I suspect :).

2 Bryan { 10.28.13 at 11:02 pm }

It is gibberish, which is why I got paid good money for conversions back in the day. There are still a lot of insurance companies using ISAM on IBM mainframes. That is something that should have been known before any of this started.

A potential problem would be if they were sending UTF-8 when the receiving system was expecting pure ASCII. That does generate gibberish. They have done so much with the front end that I would assume that it doesn’t even occur to them.

Frankly I would have had people enter their SSAN and then pulled the other directory information from the Social Security site and had people verify that it was correct. If it wasn’t, they would need to correct that before going further, and that would be outside the scope of the web site.

The less typing people have to do, the better.