MIR-2007-5B, May 2007

File Retention for Electronic National Government Services Medicare Part A and B Providers

Medicare Part A and Part B providers that submit and receive electronic files must be aware that there are certain service levels for your Medicare file retention. If you are an:

• FTP user, your dated files are retained for 45 calendar days.

- Note: do not use the TCP/IP command “delete” to delete files. Any files deleted will not be restored.

• e-Link user, your files, reports, and remittances are available for viewing or downloading for 11 days from the date that appears in the “Date/Time Viewed/ Downloaded” column. If “New” appears in the column the file is retained for 30 days from the “Date/Time Created.”

If you need to view the FTP or e-Link documentation, it can be found on our Web site at: http://www.empiremedicare.com/omnipro/pdf/tcpip_userguide.pdf

http://www.empiremedicare.com/e-link/e-linkusermanual.pdf

There is no reason why any facility should be deleting any of their received files. In the future, if there is any situation where a request is received by our Medicare EDI Help Desk at 877-273-4334 to recreate any of the electronic files, we will begin to charge your facility for any of the recreated files.

© All current procedural terminology (CPT) codes and descriptors copyrighted by the American Medical Association.