The NCPDP data services implement the messaging protocols used in the pharmacy services sector of the healthcare industry. The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) develops these protocols to improve the transmission of pharmacy-related data, including prescription transactions, medication history, and eligibility verification. Insurance companies use NCPDP transactions to process pharmacy drug claims.
The data services repository includes the following NCPDP standards for communicating pharmacy claims:
•NCPDP Batch Transaction Standard versions 1.1 and 1.2 to transmit multiple claims in batch format.
•NCPDP Telecommunication Standard Format versions 5.1 and D.0 to transmit individual claims from the point-of-sale to the insurance carrier.
NCPDP message structure
NCPDP messages have a positional layout that contains both fixed and variable-length fields. The segments and fields are delimited by control characters such as STX (ASCII 0x02), ETX (0x03), FS (0x1C), GS (0x1D), and RS (0x1E).
The following image shows part of an NCPDP billing message:
NCPDP message in XML format
The NCPDP parser data services can convert NCPDP messages into XML format. The following example shows an NCPDP message in XML format:
