ITRANS 2.0 is an upgrade in the way the existing CDA ITRANS Claims Service works. New features related to sending dental benefit claims securely on the internet include:

• You or your staff can sign in to the CDA Practice Support Services website and see the claim messages from your office—this can be a big help if there are issues with a claim transmission.
• The CDA help desk staff will have improved information to assist with identifying claim transmission issues.
• ITRANS 2.0 has stronger data privacy controls. The help desk staff will no longer see patient or plan member information. They will request the claim message “office sequence number” (not the patient’s name) to identify a claim in the system.
• ITRANS 2.0 will not have service disruptions since claims will travel directly to the insurance company.
• Improved error and issue reporting—the goal is overall system improvements to increase the number of claims you can send electronically.
• Once advanced features of ITRANS 2.0 are integrated by your software vendor, insurance company information will be updated automatically. This will mean you will always be up to date with insurance company information.

ITRANS 2.0 is a new software program that needs to be installed on the office computer that sends CDAnet dental benefit claims. All claim messages are processed with this software. This software does two main things:

1. Determines which network to use for sending the claim using updated information from CDA.

2. Removes the personal information of the patient and the plan member (called “de-identification”) and securely sends the claim to CDA for use by the help desk and reporting. Responses to claim messages you receive also go through the ITRANS software and are also de-identified and sent to CDA.

ITRANS 2.0 has been designed with privacy as a priority to minimize any risks. Identifiable patient information is only transmitted to the insurance company. All the de-identified information is stored at secure data centres, fully encrypted, and always located in Canada.

The dentist and office information in claim messages is stored for 60 days for use by the help desk and the CDA Practice Support Services website to view claim transmission issues. The information kept longer for reporting has the dentist and dental office information de-identified. This means you and your office cannot be identified within the information kept for reporting. The de-identified information will be used to monitor the CDAnet e-claims system. It will also be used for reporting on the dental services provided across Canada. These reports will not identify any individual dentist or dental office.

With ITRANS 2.0, sending claims will continue to function as it normally does. However, when you want to verify a problem with a claim transmission, the CDA help desk will have better information to help you. Or, now you can choose to sign on to the Practice Support Services website (https://services.cda-adc.ca) to review your transmitted claims and received responses.

As the dentist subscribed to the CDAnet and ITRANS services, your use of the ITRANS software to send claims means you are the person transmitting the claim, and you are the person de-identifying the patient information from the claim and sending the de-identified claims to CDA. All the terms of use for ITRANS are contained in the CDAnet/ITRANS subscriber agreement here.

There is no additional consent required for ITRANS 2.0. CDA has undertaken an extensive privacy review for ITRANS 2.0 and the conclusion was that because the de-identification employed follows the highest standards and enables dentists to comply with privacy provisions such as “data minimization”, this “pro-privacy” activity is not one that requires consent. Once the claims messages have been de-identified, consent for their use for activities such as the help desk and reporting is not required.

However, please keep in mind that the existing CDAnet consent that patients are required to sign for you to transmit their claims electronically has not changed and is still required. These consents are available in the CDAnet Dental Office User Guide.