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Bulk Bill Claim

Lodge claims where the patient assigns their Medicare benefits to the provider
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A Bulk Bill claim is submitted when a patient assigns their right to Medicare benefits to the health professional who provided the service. Services Australia assesses the claim and pays the benefit directly to the provider via EFT.

Claim Types

RebateRight supports three Bulk Bill service types:

General Services

Standard GP and general practitioner consultations.

Specialist Services

Specialist, Allied Health, and Diagnostic Imaging services.

Pathology Services

Pathology services subject to a pathology request.

All vouchers in a single claim must use the same serviceTypeCode. You cannot mix General, Specialist, and Pathology services in one claim.

Claim Structure

Each Bulk Bill claim contains:

  • One servicing provider and one payee provider (where applicable — they cannot be the same)
  • Up to 80 Medical Events (Vouchers)
  • A consistent serviceTypeCode across all vouchers

Each voucher contains:

  • One patient
  • A date of service
  • Up to 14 services (MBS items)
  • Referral details (where applicable)

Mixed Referral and Request Services

Specialists may submit claims with a mixture of services requiring both referral and request information in the same voucher. To do this, include referral details at the voucher level alongside the relevant service-level request details.

This only applies to specialist services combining Referrals and Diagnostic Imaging Requests in the same voucher. Pathology Requests must be submitted separately.

Validations

RuleLimit
Medical Events per claimMaximum 80
Services per Medical EventMaximum 14
Medical Event IDsMust start at 01 and increment by one
Service IDsMust be unique within the claim
Date of ServiceMust not be more than 2 years in the past
Daily claim volumeMore than 2,500 BBSW claims from the same Payee Provider and Location ID per day will be rejected

EFT Payment Details

Services Australia no longer issues cheques for Bulk Bill payments. Health professionals must register their bank details with Services Australia to receive payments via EFT.

If a health professional practises at more than one location, bank details must be registered for each location separately.

To register EFT details, refer health professionals to: Claim Bulk Bill Payments — Services Australia

Resubmitting Rejected Claims

If a claim is rejected, you can resubmit it after correcting the errors. Key rules:

  • Use the same correlationId to resubmit a corrected version of the same claim
  • Use a new correlationId if you are submitting a different claim
  • Review the error messages in the response — they must be displayed to the end user exactly as returned, without modification

It is a requirement by Services Australia that error messages are displayed to the end user exactly as supplied in the response — not truncated, transformed, or changed in any way.