New claim edit: Invalid phone numbers

Stedi now rejects 837P professional, 837D dental, and 837I institutional claims that contain an invalid phone number.

Stedi already fixes common formatting issues for phone numbers in claims. These fixes include:

• Removing non-alphanumeric characters, such as spaces, parentheses, or hyphens.

• Converting vanity letters, such as those in 1-800-MEDICARE, to numbers

• Removing leading country codes, such as 1 from 11-digit numbers.

Sometimes, phone numbers still don’t meet phone number validation requirements even after all fixes have been made. Invalid phone numbers will ultimately be rejected by payers, which delays the ultimate adjudication of the claim.

Stedi has introduced a new edit – the industry term for automated validation rules – to ensure all telephone numbers in a claim are exactly 10 digits after all fixes.

If you submit a claim that fails the edit using Stedi’s claim submission APIs or professional claim form, you’ll get back an error message in real time. If you’re using a JSON API endpoint, the response includes error details in the errors array:

{
  "errors": [
   {
      "code": "33",
      "description": "Billing provider phone number is in an invalid format. The expected format is 10 numeric digits (0123456789); no country code, punctuation, or extension. Correct and resubmit.",
      "followupAction": "Please Correct and Resubmit"
    }
  ],
  ...
}

If you submit a claim that fails the edit using SFTP, Stedi will reject the claim with a 277CA claim acknowledgment. The acknowledgment will contain a related claim status category code, claim status code, and error message. You can use the error message to correct and resubmit the claim.