You can send 837P (Professional) claims to payers through the Stedi portal, the Professional Claims API, or an SFTP connection.

Once you send a claim, Stedi automatically receives and processes 277 Claim Acknowledgment (277CA) and 835 Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) responses.

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Before sending claims

You may need to complete the following steps before sending claims.

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Transaction enrollment

All payers require providers to complete an enrollment process before they can start receiving claim remittances (ERAs). Some payers also require enrollment before allowing providers to submit claims.

The Stedi Payer Network lists which payers require transaction enrollment. Visit Transaction Enrollment for details about the transaction enrollment process.

We recommend running a coordination of benefits (COB) check to ensure you submit claims to the correct payer. COB checks can help you determine:

  • If a patient is covered by more than one health plan
  • Whether coverage overlap requires coordination of benefits
  • Each payer’s responsibility for payment (primacy) in coordination of benefits scenarios

Visit Coordination of benefits (COB) checks for more information.

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Manual submission

Manual claim submission can be useful for testing, QA, and debugging your pipeline. You can submit 837P professional claims manually through the Create manual claim page in the Stedi portal.

The in-app form is adapted from the CMS-1500 Claim Form. As you build the claim, Stedi validates provider NPIs, diagnosis codes, and other key information to reduce payer rejections. You can also review a live preview of the autogenerated JSON payload for the Professional Claims API to understand how the form relates to the request structure.

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SFTP submission

You can use Stedi’s fully-managed SFTP server to submit claims to to payers and retrieve claim responses without calling Stedi’s APIs.

You must submit claims in X12 EDI format, and Stedi returns claim responses through the SFTP connection in X12 EDI format. This makes Stedi SFTP a good option if you have an existing system that generates X12 EDI files and you want to send them through the Stedi clearinghouse without completing an API integration. Visit SFTP connection for more information.

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API submission

Call one of the following endpoints to submit 837 professional claims:

The endpoint returns a synchronous response from Stedi in JSON format. Later, the payer will respond with a Claim Acknowledgment (277CA).

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Headers

When constructing the request, you must include the following information in HTTP headers:

  • Authorization: Generate an API key to use for authentication.
  • Content-Type: Set to application/json.

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Enhanced validation

You can optionally set the Stedi-Validation header to snip for enhanced validation on your claim submission.

Enhanced validation uses hundreds of additional edits (the industry term for validation rules) to increase claim acceptance rates. These include Strategic National Implementation Process (SNIP) validations. Stedi also automatically fixes common errors and monitors payer rejections to proactively build out new rules.

There is an additional cost per claim submission when you use enhanced validation. Please reach out to support for access and pricing information.

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Body

The information you submit for a claim depends on your use case. Refer to the Professional Claims endpoint for a complete list of properties. However, all claims require the following high-level information:

InformationDescription
tradingPartnerServiceIdThis is the Payer ID. Visit the Payer Network for a complete list.
tradingPartnerNameThis is the payer’s business name, like Cigna or Aetna.
submitter objectInformation about the entity submitting the healthcare claim. This can be either an individual or an organization, such as a doctor, hospital, or insurance company.
receiver objectInformation about the payer, such as an insurance company or government agency.
subscriber and/or dependent objectsInformation about the patient who received the medical services. Note that if a dependent has their own, unique member ID for their health plan, you should submit their information in the subscriber object and omit the dependent object from the request. You can check whether the dependent has a unique member ID by submitting an Eligibility Check to the payer for the dependent. The payer will return the member ID in the dependents.memberId field, if present.
claimInformation objectInformation about the claim, such as the patient control number, claim charge amount, and place of service code. It also includes information about each individual service line included in the claim.
billing objectInformation about the billing provider, such as the NPI, taxonomy code, and organization name.

Choosing the correct claim filing indicator code is important for successful claim submission. Visit the Claims code lists documentation for best practices for selecting the appropriate code.

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Character restrictions

Only use the X12 Basic and Extended character sets in request data. Using characters outside these sets may cause validation and HTTP 400 errors.

In addition, the following characters are reserved for delimiters in the final X12 EDI transaction to the payer: ~, *, :, and ^. X12 doesn’t support using escape sequences to represent delimiters or special characters. Stedi returns a 400 error if you use these restricted characters improperly.

  • JSON endpoint: Don’t include delimiter characters anywhere in your request data.
  • Raw X12 endpoint: You can use these characters as delimiters, but not in the body of the request data.

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Identify service lines

A claim can contain multiple service lines. Since the payer may accept, reject, or pay a subset of those lines, you can receive an 835 response that references a patientControlNumber, but only pertains to some of the service lines.

However, the claimInformation.serviceLines.providerControlNumber serves as a unique identifier for each service line in your claim submission. This value appears in the 277CA and 835 ERA responses as the lineItemControlNumber, allowing you to correlate these responses to specific service lines from the original claim. If you don’t set the providerControlNumber for a service line, Stedi uses a random UUID.

Stedi returns service line identifiers in the claimReference.serviceLines object of the synchronous API response.

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Sample request

The following example sends a professional claim.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://healthcare.us.stedi.com/2024-04-01/change/medicalnetwork/professionalclaims/v3/submission \
  --header 'Authorization: <api-key>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  "usageIndicator": "T",
  "tradingPartnerServiceId": "6400",
  "submitter": {
    "organizationName": "Test Data Health Services, Inc.",
    "submitterIdentification": "<YOUR-SUBMITTER-ID>",
    "contactInformation": {
      "name": "Test Data Health Services, Inc.",
      "phoneNumber": "5552223333"
    }
  },
  "receiver": {
    "organizationName": "Cigna"
  },
  "subscriber": {
    "memberId": "U7777788888",
    "paymentResponsibilityLevelCode": "P",
    "subscriberGroupName": "Cigna",
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Anon",
    "gender": "M",
    "dateOfBirth": "20000101",
    "groupNumber": "3335555",
    "address": {
      "address1": "2222 Random St",
      "city": "A City",
      "state": "NY",
      "postalCode": "123450000"
    }
  },
  "billing": {
    "providerType": "BillingProvider",
    "npi": "<YOUR-BILLING-PROVIDER-NPI>",
    "employerId": "123456789",
    "taxonomyCode": "2084P0800X",
    "organizationName": "Therapy Associates",
    "address": {
      "address1": "123 Some St",
      "address2": "Floor 1",
      "city": "A City",
      "state": "NY",
      "postalCode": "123450000"
    },
    "contactInformation": {
      "name": "Test Data Health Services, Inc.",
      "phoneNumber": "5553334444"
    }
  },
  "claimInformation": {
    "claimFilingCode": "CI",
    "patientControlNumber": "<YOUR-PATIENT-ID>",
    "claimChargeAmount": "109.20",
    "placeOfServiceCode": "02",
    "claimFrequencyCode": "1",
    "signatureIndicator": "Y",
    "planParticipationCode": "A",
    "benefitsAssignmentCertificationIndicator": "Y",
    "releaseInformationCode": "Y",
    "healthCareCodeInformation": [
      {
        "diagnosisTypeCode": "ABK",
        "diagnosisCode": "F1111"
      }
    ],
    "serviceFacilityLocation": {
      "organizationName": "Smith Associates",
      "address": {
        "address1": "1234 Other St",
        "city": "A City",
        "state": "NY",
        "postalCode": "123450000"
      },
      "npi": "1999999984"
    },
    "serviceLines": [
      {
        "serviceDate": "20240101",
        "professionalService": {
          "procedureIdentifier": "HC",
          "procedureCode": "90837",
          "procedureModifiers": [
            "95"
          ],
          "lineItemChargeAmount": "109.20",
          "measurementUnit": "UN",
          "serviceUnitCount": "1",
          "compositeDiagnosisCodePointers": {
            "diagnosisCodePointers": [
              "1"
            ]
          }
        },
        "providerControlNumber": "111222333",
        "renderingProvider": {
          "providerType": "RenderingProvider",
          "npi": "<YOUR-PROVIDER-NPI>",
          "taxonomyCode": "111YP2000X",
          "firstName": "Jane",
          "lastName": "Smith"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "tradingPartnerName": "Cigna"
}'

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Test claims

All claims you submit through this endpoint are sent to the payer as production claims unless you explicitly designate them as test data.

To send test claims, set the usageIndicator property in the test claim body to T. This allows you to filter for test claims on the Transactions page in the Stedi portal.

Note that you will receive a 277 Claim Acknowledgment in response to test claims, allowing you to test your workflow end to end, but you will not receive a test 835 (ERA) response.

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Cancel or resubmit claims

You may need to resubmit claims for several reasons, including changes to the patient’s coverage, errors in the original claim’s information, or appealing a denied claim. You may also need to cancel duplicate claims or claims that were submitted in error.

We recommend the following for resubmitting or canceling claims:

  • Correct or replace claims: Set claimInformation.claimFrequencyCode to 7 - Replacement of Prior Claim. We also recommend setting a new, unique patientControlNumber. The payer includes this value in their 835 ERA response, allowing you to easily correlate that response with your resubmission.
  • Cancel claims : Set claimInformation.claimFrequencyCode to 8 - Void/Cancel of Prior Claim.

In both cases, identify the original claim by setting claimInformation.claimSupplementalInformation.claimControlNumber to the Payer Claim Control Number (sometimes called the ICN). This is different from the patientControlNumber you sent in the claim and the Stedi-generated controlNumber returned in the API response. You can retrieve the Payer Claim Control Number from one of the payer’s 277 responses under the key transactions.payers.claimStatusTransactions.claimStatusDetails.patientClaimStatusDetails.claims.claimStatus.tradingPartnerClaimNumber.

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View submitted claims

You can view the files that Stedi sends and receives in the Files page of the Stedi portal.

On the Transactions page, you can review and filter claims by Usage - production or test. Click any claim submission to review its details, including the full request and response payload, processing events, and a link to download the auto-generated 1500 Claim Form PDF.

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Setting a claim’s correlation ID

A claim’s correlation ID is a business identifier that you can use to track and manage claims.

  • When you submit claims through the JSON endpoint, Stedi generates the correlation ID for you, and this value will be unique for each claim.
  • When you submit claims in X12 EDI through the API or an SFTP connection, you can specify your own correlation ID in the BHT03 field. This allows you to use the same value for multiple claims if desired.

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CMS-1500 claim form PDF

Stedi automatically generates a PDF CMS-1500 claim form for each professional claim you submit. You can manually download the form on the transaction details page for the claim in Stedi or retrieve them programmatically through the following endpoints:

  • CMS-1500 PDF: Business Identifier: Retrieve PDFs through a claim’s business identifier. You can find the business identifier value in the claimReference.correlationId property Stedi returns in the synchronous claim submission response.
  • CMS-1500 PDF: Transaction ID : Retrieve PDFs through the transactionId Stedi assigns to the processed claim. This ID is included in the transaction processed event for the claim, which you can receive automatically through webhooks. You can also retrieve this ID from the transaction’s details page in Stedi.

Payers have strict requirements for submitted CMS-1500 claim forms. If you plan to send generated PDFs to payers or retain them for your records, we strongly recommend visiting CMS-1500 Claim Form PDF for information about how to structure claim submissions for optimal generation, the correct printer settings for generated PDFs, and general best practices.