I admit that I have some gray areas remaining in the Kepa-DNS model, but it
would seem that a Little Person would still have to DO something [fairly
complicated] in order for the world to be able to discover his EDI
address.. to send him the 824s, the answering 271s, etc. It was my
understanding that the DNS model required the players (senders and
receivers) who are actually routing interchanges in this manner, to
actively participate by maintaining public DNS servers, MX records, and
such. Maybe I have that wrong and possibly the system would still work
(with what appears to be a good deal of redundancy in these distributed
lookup tables) if even a few of the Big Guys maintained public address
servers.
I guess my question (to Kepa) is whether a Little Person... simply by
navigating his interchange ONE TIME thru the maze to its intended target...
would, therefore, automatically make it possible for any Big Guy to send
something directly back to him? I can't quite visualize how that would
work, but it certainly sounds like something Gov. Long would approve of!
Setting the "HIPAA seal of approval" thing aside for a moment, having the
provider's software vendor create and move (or, at least, move) these EDI
messages seems like the only reasonable option for 99% of the small
providers. The more I think about this, the less of an issue is the whole
deal about whether clearinghouses can legally charge the provider to carry
a std. transaction to a payor. I don't think the big ("real") CHs are
going to even SEE most of the providers... they will be negotiating TPAs
with a relative handful of doctor-software vendors who have sprouted highly
specialized clearinghouse departments overnight.
(since this is Sun, I should probably stop posting stuff now and let the
others weigh in on this thread)
-Chris
At 03:51 PM 2/10/02 -0500, William J. Kammerer wrote:
>"...if the doctors can get their own interchanges to the payors," then
>it stands to reason the payers should have to return the responses
>through some standard channel other than a "mail drop-box on the payors
>server." Why shouldn't the payer have to use the same means of
>"discovering" where the provider is - say, Kepa's DNS "directory"? If
>the provider has said he takes e-mail'ed standard transactions as S/MIME
>attachments encrypted using this here certificate, that seems like a
>fairly standard and cost-efficient means of returning acknowledgements
>and responses. Forcing each provider to go through hoops polling an
>untold number of payers' web sites to access a "drop-box" seems like "an
>impediment to frictionless e-commerce and an extra cost providers can do
>without." Where have I heard that before?
>
>Power to the "little" people! Just call me the Huey "Kingfish" Long of
>EDI.
Christopher J. Feahr, OD
http://visiondatastandard.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cell/Pager: 707-529-2268
