----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 8:35 AM
Subject: Re: Route through email and
attach EDI files
I see Martin's 2 cents and raise a nickle. He makes a good point ---
especially for small volume batches. However where things get dicey is when
attachments start getting too large to get through firewalls and/or negatively
impact network performance. For example, I worked for a large west coast HMO
that had a 1.5MB limit on attachments. We did a lot of secure e-mailing of
capitated patient rosters to IPAs and medical groups. Some of these were too
big to go through the firewall so we either broke them up into smaller files
or (horrors!) burned CDs.
Paul Weber
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----
Original Message -----
From: Martin Scholl
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 15:39:29 -0400
To:
WEDi/SNIP ID & Routing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Route through email
and attach EDI files
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1
After following the discussion now for a few
months I begin to believe that we have not solved routing, one of
the most basic issues of EDI. All this talk about CPP and ebXML makes my
head spin; and to be honest, having my hands full with transaction sets, I
don't see myself studying now XML too.
Why don't we use email as the preferred mode of
routing?
This would solve most problems.
- email is secure. Encrypting email with
PGP, Pretty Good Privacy is cheap, proven and common place
- Attachments can be relatively large, mega bytes
if need be and numerous too
- routing of email is long solved and works
great as we all know
- Identifiers are left between you and your
trading partner. We don't have to invent or find a unique ID as long
it is 15 digits long.
- virus filters and such are widely available and
HIPAA Security can be attained at low costs
- By having a robot check the inbox every minute
or so, "realtime" or something reasonably close to that can be
achieved.
- TA1, 997,271,277 ..... are send back as an
attachment
- You can also send back the detailed analysis
information. EDI compliance checker software produces verbose
output and when you send that back in the body of the email to the
message provider, you can give near instant feedback and go through the
training and testing phase faster.
- Off course, if you need to submit 10gig of EDI
to CMS, this does not work, but for the traffic between providers and
payers, email would solve the routing question
I just started to test my payer oriented software
with a provider software house in India. We tried ftp and were
frustrated. We were fighting firewall issues, I had power outages
and my server was down, my IP lease expired and India is about 12 hours
ahead of me so that we could never communicate in real
time. Moving the communications over to email solved all these
problems and now we can concentrate on transaction set
issues.
My 2cents
--
