CMS is reporting that its Assessment Submission and Processing (ASAP) system for agencies to submit OASIS data starting Jan. 1, 2015, is experiencing a problem with the Branch ID.
 
CMS told the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) Jan. 9 that the federal Medicare agency hopes to have the issue resolved by the end of the week. Agencies should contact a technical support help desk at (800) 339-9313 with further questions.
 
Chicago-based data vendor Allscripts reports its clients were among some home health agencies that started reporting issues with ASAP on Jan. 2, says Concetta DiFranco, an Allscripts spokeswoman.
 
Allscripts has implemented a back-end utility that remedies the issue in the short-term and will be rolling out a permanent fix in the coming days, DiFranco says.
 
Data vendor Stratis Business Systems, of Boca Raton, Fla., also had trouble submitting to the ASAP system. Customers received error -904 (tags longer than 30 characters cannot be processed), product manager Julie Wolff says.
 
Stratis also was advised by CMS that the XML files have to be encoded as ASCII for them to be submitted and make it past a valid XML check, Wolff says. The vendor is currently making an encoding change and testing it before deployment to its wider customer base, she says.