From Medilink 2022 versions onwards with the new Medicare Online Web Services, Medicare has changed the way that Bulk Bill Claims (aka Batches) are identified.
Medicare issues a Claim Id for each Bulk Bill Claim. This is not known until after a Bulk Bill Claim is created, and is different to the Batch Number.
The Batch Number is not sent to Medicare. Medicare has no knowledge of it - it is just for Medilink purposes only. You are best off quoting a patient in the Bulk Bill Claim instead.
Medilink prints both Batch Number and Claim Id on the Processing & Payment Reports. We are going to include more visual linking of the identifiers in the software in an upcoming update.
What is confusing to most users, (as of May 2022), is that Medicare are repeatedly issuing the same Claim Id sequence (A0001, A0002) each day for each Provider. If you have multiple Providers it's entirely possible to have multiple A0001 Claim Ids on a single day.
This duplication of identifiers on the same day was the initial cause of a Payment Report bug in early versions: https://help.medilink.com.au/en/support/solutions/articles/11000113331-payment-report-wrong-batch-reported
We have repeatedly asked for Medicare to change this logic, but there is no update on the issue as yet. Technically the system works fine as it is (now) however it continues to confuse practices and support teams with the way it is.
Some have asked why we have both, why can't we just keep the Batch Number only. We have retained the use of Batch Numbers as a unique internal identifier because the systems have decades of logic and data and reports with this identifier (and this is not able to be changed without significant changes to the system); however we cannot exclude or change the Medicare issued Claim Id as that comes directly from them. Therefore we need to display both.