The purpose of Certification Testing is to ensure that each third-party processor system is able to receive FIR Requests sent by the Transaction Facilitator, then generate and return correctly formed and populated FIR Response messages within permissible response times. Each Test Case consists of a single F1, F2, or F3 Request for a different test beneficiary.
Multiple Test Cases are defined for each transaction type (F1, F2, or F3) to simulate different types of situations regarding the coverage months and monthly accumulator values that already exist on the processor system for the test beneficiary, and the corresponding values that are expected in a correctly populated Response to the Request.
Additional Test Cases are defined to test situations where a reject Response is expected, such as a FIR Request being sent for a beneficiary that does not exist on the processor system being tested.
Note: Certification Testing is intended as a transaction-level test of a processors ability to properly form, populate, and return FIR responses to a pre-defined group of Requests given certain beneficiary financial accumulator pre-conditions. These tests do not attempt to exhaustively recreate every scenario in the NCPDP Implementation Guide or CMS Guidance, which involve multiple transactions across multiple plans. Instead, they are a representative sample of the kinds of Requests that a single plan within those scenarios might receive given different states of the plan’s stored financial activity for a beneficiary relative to any accumulator values passed in the Request.
The certification process tests proper messaging between the facilitator and a plan, but does not attempt to test how the supplied data is processed internally within a plan system, nor the methods by which the facilitator determines which plans should receive transactions and when, nor the methods by which the facilitator uses the Response contents from one plan to create the Request for the next plan in a FIR sequence.
All documents related to FIR Certification can be found on under Related Documents on the right-hand side of this page.