Recent CMS guidance in the past 6 weeks has had a significant impact on Machine Readable File schema and hosting requirements, and these updates are expected to continue until 3/1/2022. While many of these changes have cut down on the overall file sizes and number of files, the schema changes also present a significant challenge with a looming compliance date of 7/1/2022.
Sapphire has been on the leading edge of these changes and continues to offer a compliant offering for MRF creation and hosting. We’ve accounted for the file structure changes, the inclusion of the Table of Contents (ToC) addition, and we are meeting directly with CMS to share our own feedback, as well as the feedback of our clients, as CMS looks to make additional changes.
If you are having issues with MRF creation, MRF aggregation, creation of ToC’s, hosting, and/or archiving, Sapphire can help. It is not too late. Please reach out to your Account Manager or Sales Partner for details.
If you are not a current Sapphire customer, we can still help, and are helping for multiple “new to Sapphire” customers already. Please Request a Meeting.
Important items to keep in mind:
- Archiving requirements are still not clear from CMS. Our plan partners are planning to archive as little as 1 month’s MRF’s and as much as 10-years worth. This would purely be for audit purposes. We anticipate CMS to provide additional guidance on this.
- If you think you have a homegrown path forward, but are looking to bounce ideas off of someone, or validate your approach, we’re happy to have that conversation, too.
- While timing is very tight, we can still help you hit these compliance deadlines.
If you are a Blue Plan, here are a few other items to consider:
- The BCBSA MFT Exchange files will not be fully-compliant with CMS MRF format requirements without configuration.
- The BCBSA MFT Exchange will not support public file hosting or linking from plans who deploy a Table of Contents with links to host plan MRFs.