BizTalk 101 - Installment 1 - HIPAA EDI

As I mention in my bio- I'm new to this. And one thing I've found is that it is very difficult for newbies like myself to find information that everyone else 'just knows.' So, fairly frequently, I'll be posting some of these 100 & 200 level tidbits, in case some other young developer comes along and says "That's great! But how do I get from nothing to that point!?" So, the first installment has to do with HIPAA. I work for a Health Revenue Cycle Management company, so we do a lot of HIPAA EDI (ANSI X12 837, 835, etc.). For one particular client, we don't actually do anything with the files we receive except forward them on, but we do need to know what's in them so we can log them properly. Now, for any normal implementation, that would be no big deal: the filenames would follow some standard which could be used, or the ISA 05/06 & 07/08 information would be sufficient, or whatever. Oh, no. That would be too easy. Anyone already in the HIPAA EDI world may know that Medicare and Medicaid often use Third Party Administrators - sometimes including normal, commercial insurance companies - to handle their claims processing. This can mean, in the right circumstances, that a file comming from, say, CIGNA, might actually be full of Medicare claims. This prevents us from just using the ISA sender/receiver information. Instead, we have to parse out the entire file, just so we can read the first instance of a Patient level NM109 for the Insurance member Id to determine if this is a Medicare or Medicaid file, or if this is really a commercial payer. Luckilly, BizTalk is our friend in this. And this is where that long lead-off gets to some BizTalk 101. I spent the last couple of days trying to figure out how to get BizTalk 2009 to parse out those records. I knew that my friend Tim Rayburn (http://timrayburn.net) had addressed something similar, but it took me a while to find (in his blog, no less). The secret, as is said in Kung-Fu Panda, is that there is no secret. The entire process is 7 steps. 1) Open your BizTalk project (a new one, in my case) 2) Locate the HIPAA maps (harder than you'd think- look for a self extracting zip file burried in the BizTalk folder structure). 3) Add the necessary maps to your project. 4) Deploy the project. 5) Create/Configure a Receive Port & receive location. 6) Create/Configure a Send Port. 7) Restart the BizTalk application. There are a whole lot of specifics that are left out here. But this should be enough to point anyone in the right direction to get such a thing up and running. Tim calls this "From zero to Claims Processing in 15 minutes or less."