As some of you may be aware, NHIC has announced a change to their password
policy for their BBS, which will take effect April 11th, 2005. This
change requires that your password be at least 8 characters long; contain
at least one letter, one number, and one special character. In addition,
they are now storing the passwords you have used for the last 5 months,
and not allowing you to re-use the password.
How this affects you:
This change does not prohibit your ability to create and send claims
manually to Medicare using the Validator, but does affect the Autosend
Feature. As many of you may be aware, in order for us to automatically
enter new passwords every 30 days when they expired, we were swapping
back and forth between two passwords. Since Medicare is now keeping
a password history, we will no longer be able to do that.
So the Autosend Feature will no longer work?
The Autosend Feature in your current Validator still works just
fine, except that every 30 days when the password expires,
the current
Validator will no longer be able to automatically update it to
a new password. We thought we would be stuck with this disadvantage
for good, but then Gary had a great idea. "What if we appended
a pound sign and a number (0 through 9) to the end of the their
password?" We
decided in the interest of making things easier for our clients,
that we would change our Validator program and the way the Autosend
Feature uses passwords so that it does just this. Now, when your
password expires (which everyone's password will do on Monday,
the 11th of April), the Validator will automatically figure out
a new
password and enter it in for you.
So how do I get this new, better version of the Validator?
This improvement to the way Validator handles passwords for NHIC
Medicare has been included, along with many other improvements,
into Validator 5.8.0, a FREE update available to all of our Validator
5 users for download at http://www.satechs.com/validatordownloads.htm.
Feel free to download and run the update to take advantage of this
new feature. While you are there, please take a gander at our new
web site and let us know what you think!
Note: This new password-handling feature is DATE SENSITIVE! Please
make sure your computer’s System Date is set appropriately
when you connect to Medicare on Monday, April 11th!
Thank you all for your continued patronage!
Adam Ziegler, M.C.S.E.
Gary R. Stephens, Owner
Stephens & Associates
Creators of The Validator Direct Electronic Claims
http://www.StephensAssociates.com OR http://www.SAtechs.com
