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Nineteen ninety-three will be a year of significant change for patient financial services departments in all clinical healthcare settings. The year ahead will see the implementation of the long awaited Uniform Bill 1992 (UB-92) as well as the continuing adaptation of key healthcare billing documents to electronic data interchange (EDI) standards.
UB-92
UB-92 is scheduled for implementation on Oct. 1, 1993. Anticipating this event, the National Uniform Billing Committee (NUBC) and various state uniform billing committees (SUBCs) will release a series of documents prior to April 1 to facilitate UB-92 implementation.
A final copy of the approved UB-92 form and national manual was released by the NUBC in October 1992. This version was similar to the March 1992 version the NUBC had first approved; but in September, the NLBC finalized the document and data set and added field locator 37 (FL37), which allows for claims identification numbers to be added to the document.
By Jan. 15, 1993, the various SUBCs are scheduled to release their state versions of UB-92. These versions of UB-92 vary in the way that each SUBC dictates how their four state FLs will be used. In preparing UB-92, the NUBC hoped that it could accommodate the most commonly used state FLs and therefore limit the number of state variations. Many states, however, have already indicated a need for additional variations.
The state version announcements are important to all parties, but especially important to providers that must bill in multiple states. Each version of UB-92 will require different application programming and cause some payers and nearly all software vendors to provide up to 50 versions of the same uniform bill.
The NUBC is scheduled to publish its "final" code set for the Oct. 1, 1993, implementation by April 1, 1993. As it began the process of updating UB-82, the NUBC promised a moratorium on code changes during the implementation. This moratorium will last from April 1, 1993, until Jan. 1, 1994, the date that UB-82 will no longer be endorsed by the NUBC and its members.
While nine months may seem like more than enough time for...