NCPDP Telecom Configurator

NCPDP (National Council for Prescription Drug Programs) defines a set of standard message formats used in the prescription drug industry. These formats address messages from pharmacy to payer, prescriber to pharmacy, and others. The NCPDP Telecom formats that have been designated as HIPAA standard transactions are supported.

Note: NCPDP Telecom requires a license to operate. It is activated with one of two possible license keys. An individual cl-mm-ncpdp license key activates NCPDP Telecom. An overall cl-mm-ncpdpall license key activates all of the NCPDP formats (Telecom, Formulary and Benefit, and SCRIPT).

A basic aspect of HIPAA compliance is support for the message formats that are designated as standard. The HIPAA rules state: "No plan may refuse to accept or significantly increase the processing time for a transaction submitted in a HIPAA standard format." Therefore, these standard formats must be supported to claim HIPAA compliance.

HIPAA has designated two NCPDP Telecom formats as standard:

  • Telecommunications Standard v5.1

    A variable format that is designed for real-time communications between a pharmacy and a payer.

  • Batch Standard v1.0 and v1.1

    A file format that is used to encapsulate a set of transactions. The batch standard is a wrapper around a set of transactions that are formatted according to the Telecom v5.1 standard. HIPAA specifies that data records in the batch are in Telecommunications v5.1 format.

Copying and pasting across variants

Fields, Composite Data Structures, Tokens, and Transactions can be copied and pasted across variants. When one of these is highlighted, right-clicking opens a with Copy, Paste, and Delete options.

Multiple selections are permitted.

Note: The Paste action does not apply between different HMD formats.