NCPDP (National Council for Prescription Drug Programs) telecommunication standard specifies the format of pharmacy claims and other pharmacy-related transactions.
NCPDP is a quirky legacy format that would feel alien to any modern-day developer or an IT person.
For example, it uses non-printable separators and non-mnemonic two-character field identifiers; it relies on an obscure way to encode numbers with decimal points; it uses a mixture of variable and fixed length fields.
Nevertheless, the format is still widely used in the pharmacy space.
We published several posts to help anyone dealing with this pesky format quickly get up to speed:
- NCPDP introduction in plain English. If you know nothing about the NCPDP format, start here.
- NCPDP separators. This post explains the “non-printable” separator characters used to denote fields and records.
- NCPDP headers. NCPDP uses fixed-length transaction headers. The problem is there are two different versions of the same header. This post explains it all.
- Interactive example of a pharmacy claim in NCPDP format. This is an example of a typical pharmacy claim with a field-by-field explanation.
Finally, we provide a completely free NCPDP viewer and file reader to help you make sense of your NCPDP files.