Healthcare Financial Services IG Edition 1 - Local Development build (v0.3.0) built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) Build Tools. See the Directory of published versions

Error Handling

This section details the types of errors reported, the places within the technical artifacts where the details of the error(s) are reported and the general guidance for addressing errors.

• Status Codes: are based on the Operation $process-message within HL7 FHIR.
• Connection: refers to the open communication channel between the HCP/HIC and nphies to complete a given message exchange cycle.
• Happy Path: refers to the situation where a message exchange completes with the sucessful exchange of messages. Note that the response message may identify errors in the request message, but as long as the messages are exchanged this is considered a success and the Status code SHALL be 200 OK.
• In the case of nphies receiving an invalid response message it SHALL open a new communication channel to report the error details with the authoring system.
• HCP systems which receive an invalid response message with need to respond out of band to nphies to address the issue. Note, this should be a rare event.

The sections below outline the message exchange cycle between the HCP and HIC through the clearinghouse platform, where some of the messages contain errors that are reported by the receiving system to the authoring system in order to be corrected and submitted again.

When a request message is submitted to a Receiver, nphies or an HIC, by any Sender, nphies, HCP or HIC, then the Receiver SHALL validate the message and if errors are found, it SHALL send back a response message indicating the nature of the error. If possible the response message SHALL contain a business level response such as a claim-response message. However, if it is not possible to construct a business level message then the Receiver SHALL respond with an OperationOutcome resource containing the error codes. OperationOutcome would be used, for example, when a message received is unreadable, or the sender/ receiver is invalid, or the message type is not valid. In all cases the response message SHALL be contained within a message Bundle.

HCP Error Handling

In the event of HCP sending a message with errors to nphies, nphies responds to HCP with a message or an OperationOutcome to advise that their request contained errors. The diagram and table below outline the response based on the type of error.

nphies Handling of HIC Errors

In the event of HIC sending a message with errors to nphies, nphies initiates a new message exchange with the HIC and sends an Error Notice message listing the errors in the received message from the HIC. The diagram and table below outline the response based on the type of error.

HIC Error Handling

In the event of nphies sending a message with errors to the HIC, the HIC SHALL send back an acknowledgment to confirm receiving the error-notice or containing an OperationOutcome listing the errors in the received message from nphies.

Error Codes

The Business and Validation rules error codes follow a pattern: RR-NNNNN where RR is the type of rule, as shown in the following table, and NNNNN is the unique rule number.