CMS established Internet-based Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS) as an alternative to the paper (CMS-855) enrollment process. Internet-based PECOS allows physicians, non-physician practitioners and provider and supplier organizations to enroll, make a change in their Medicare enrollment, view their Medicare enrollment information on file with Medicare, or check on status of a Medicare enrollment application via the Internet. The machine readable file for this initiative was released by CMS on Thursday June 24th.
Within a day of the CMS file release on the new PECOS initiative our programmers were already working to fully integrate a real-time PECOS support tool with cross verification of provider name. This was ready and rolled out to our users the following Monday June 28th, an astonishing 4 days after CMS released the initial file. This highlights the strength of using a centrally hosted Web-based system like ContinuLink where updates and system enhancements can be rapidly and seamlessly rolled out, without user intervention and without interruption of service, stated ContinuLink CEO Satish Movva.
In addition to the PECOS enrollment and Physician name cross verification, ContinuLink also enhanced the system to automatically take pending enrollments into account. Two days later, on June 30th additional functionality was added to ContinuLink to give real time verification of new physicians as new referrals or physicians were entered into the system.
One ContinuLink customer, Sarah Ahmed of Fresno California stated, ContinuLink had the solution for PECOS implemented before we even thought to raise the question to them! We came in on Monday morning thinking as most home care providers did that we have to manually check each physician by hand and all of our physicians were already automatically checked for PECOS eligibility by ContinuLink.
About ContinuLink:
ContinuLink, Your Link to The Continuum of Care™, is a software solution for health care businesses including Home Health Care, Hospice, Private Duty, and Supplemental Medical Staffing. With its reliance on open Web technologies, ContinuLink is well ahead of any other software in the industry. Always available anywhere, anytime, ContinuLink not only makes sense...it makes dollars and sense.
For more information please visit www.continulink.com or call 561-339-9950.
