Life Made Easier with CMS’s Surrogacy Program STREAMLINE YOUR ACCESS TO PECOS, EHR, AND NPPES By David Zetter early 2010, members of the Medicare Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS) Power User Group met with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) officials to discuss updates needed for the PECOS program. The mission of the Power User Group is to inform CMS of what works – and what doesn’t work – and find ways to make it easier for the provider and organization community to do business with CMS. members of the Power user group, including myself, informed Cms that providers rarely perform their own enrollments or updates to their enrollments. The Power user group meetings revealed that providers and organizations were not going to start doing all of this work themselves. Cms learned that there were too many other parties completing this work on behalf of the providers and organizations, so they had to develop a system that would allow for others to work on behalf of the providers and organizations. Here are the initial issues Cms needed to resolve: • Individual providers assigned others to work on their behalf in PeCOs or the National Plan & Provider enumeration system (NPPes). • The sharing of personal account information caused security violations. • The process for gaining access to PeCOs took weeks, was not clear, and required mailing documents to external user services (eus). • users were required to contact eus to reset forgotten usernames and passwords. exposing these issues helped make the surrogacy Program (Identity & access management system, or I&a) a reality. How We Got Here There were several issues that led to the development of the surrogacy Program. The username and password that a provider or organization uses to obtain its National Provider Identifier (NPI) and create its NPPes account is the same username and password used for accessing PeCOs and electronic health record (eHr) registration and attestation. most of us (billing department personnel, credentialers, provider/organization staff, third-party vendors, etc.) realize that most providers and organizations rarely set up their initial accounts or enrollments or complete their eHr meaningful use registration and attestation. so, the providers and organizations share that information with others to get the work done on their behalf. There’s one problem with this: Cms regulations do not allow providers and organizations to share this information with anyone. There are privacy issues and, more importantly, fraud and abuse implications. in 10 HBma BILLINg • jaNuarY.FeBruarY.2015 sTePs FOr usINg I&a 1. set up your account as an aO or dO 2. Choose an employer - conduct a search based on the legal name of your organization and the zip code 3. select whether you will be the aO or dO for the organization 4. Provide proof of your employment to officially set up your account 5. set up connections with providers and organizations 6. manage your staff's connections and access status 7. enjoy streamlined access to PeCOs, eHr, and NPPes!
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