PBS Online Outages

If your connection to PBS Online is interrupted, any scripts you dispense are queued and are sent to Medicare within 30 minutes of the connection being restored.

Causes of an outage

• You are not connected to the internet. In this situation you will receive no messages at all in the Fred Dispense Messenger. Fred Connect may display a message that it was unable to find an internet connection.
• PBS Online is temporarily unavailable. Fred Dispense Messenger will display technical messages; for example:
  • R983 – Connection to Medicare Australia is unavailable at this time.
  • Error messages beginning with T3000 +.

Script queuing

Scripts you dispense while disconnected from PBS Online are queued for sending. Fred Connect is scheduled to run a resend check task every 30 minutes, which sends any scripts that have not previously been transmitted.

If Fred Connect receives responses from PBS Online that indicate a problem with the system, it will attempt to decrease the load on PBS Online by pausing for a random number of minutes before re-attempting the task.

Once back online, the scripts will be transmitted with an 02 processing code. This indicates that a response was not received in a timely manner and the script will generally be accepted for payment, even if under normal transmission the script would have received a rejection response.