Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Delaware County has awarded ACA a contract to assist the County in submitting Consolidated Community Reporting (CCR) files to the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW). Through the arrangement, ACA will assume responsibility for managing changes to the submission process, which includes handling the encounter file format change to the HIPAA-compliant 837 transaction set. This allows Delaware County's Office of Mental Health to focus on what it does best-- providing a wide array of services to its residents.

One of the challenges that Delaware County faced was that its current application was no longer supported and could not be modified to handle the submission of CCR encounter data using the 837 file format. But the County was hesitant to replace the application because it allowed its staff to capture the necessary encounter information easily without the overhead and complexities that other applications impose.

ACA will solve this dilemma by replacing Delaware County's existing system with MASTRR™ CCR, a light-weight application designed to maintain the information necessary to support fiscal accountability and accurate CCR reporting. MASTRR™ CCR will allow Delaware County to continue capturing information easily, while at the same time complying with the new file submission format.

In addition to the implementation of MASTRR™ CCR, the contract provides the County with a way to submit CCR data to DPW without being burdened with any future formatting changes. This is done through ACA's Data Service Bureau model, which handles the transformation of the County's raw data into the format DPW requires. The Service Bureau also manages the receipt of the resultant error files (both the proprietary EBX files and HIPAA standard 227 files) from DPW, and it translates those error files into reports that provide relevant information to the County. Finally, ACA handles any changes to edit checks imposed by DPW, coding changes, or other sources through this process.

This diagram presents an overview of the architecture of ACA's solution:

ACA is ready to offer personalized consultations to assist counties wishing to utilize our expertise to expand their reporting and business intelligence capabilities. For more information, please contact our Sales and Marketing Department at 610-359-1210 or information@acainc.com.