New to Fort Bragg: Setting Up Your PCM After a PCS

When you arrive at Fort Bragg on PCS orders, the first health-care task is updating your address and personal information in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) through milConnect. This is not optional -- your TRICARE enrollment changes are tied to the date your address update takes effect in DEERS.

TRICARE's Moving page sets out when a move counts as a qualifying life event: in its wording, the relocation must be to a new country, city, region, or ZIP+4 code to be a QLE. The same page states the deadline, that you have 90 days from the date of your address change to change your TRICARE health plan. A separate rule governs when a change takes effect: if you do change plans, the effective date is the date your address change is effective in DEERS. Those are two different dates doing two different jobs, so update DEERS as soon as you arrive rather than treating it as the thing that starts the clock.

You can update DEERS and manage most enrollment tasks through milConnect at milconnect.dmdc.osd.mil. For technical support with milConnect, DMDC's Support Center is available at 800-477-8227.

In the TRICARE East Region (which covers all of North Carolina, including Fort Bragg), Humana Military administers enrollment. After updating DEERS, contact Humana Military at 800-444-5445 to enroll in a plan or change your region, plan, and PCM.

You can also change your PCM online through Beneficiary Web Enrollment (BWE) in milConnect. TRICARE East's own note on changing a PCM is that you need to wait six days, or until you receive confirmation from TRICARE East, before receiving care from the new provider, or point-of-service fees may apply.

If you don't select a PCM, Humana Military will assign one for you. If you prefer a specific family medicine or internal medicine provider, it is worth choosing actively rather than accepting the automatic assignment.

When enrolling or re-enrolling at a new duty station, you will generally choose between TRICARE Prime and TRICARE Select (active-duty service members are typically enrolled in Prime automatically; this section applies mainly to family members and retirees making their own enrollment choices).

Under TRICARE Prime you are assigned a PCM, and everyone on Prime needs referrals. What differs is how much they cover: active-duty service members need one for any care their PCM does not provide, which TRICARE states includes urgent, routine, preventive and specialty care, while other Prime beneficiaries need one for specialty care and some diagnostic services. Costs are generally lower, but you have less flexibility in choosing providers. Under TRICARE Select, TRICARE says only applied behavior analysis requires a referral, so you can see a TRICARE-authorized provider directly for most care. Two things keep that from being a flat rule: a specific set of services still needs pre-authorization under Select, and what you pay depends on your beneficiary group and on whether the provider is in network. TRICARE tells Select enrollees to check with their regional contractor for additional requirements before scheduling.

Which plan fits is not a judgement this page can make for you: cost shares and network availability vary by beneficiary category, sponsor status and location, and the trade-off between Prime's coordinated model and Select's wider provider choice depends on how your family actually uses care. Your regional contractor can walk through your own numbers with you.

If you had active specialist referrals at your previous duty station, ask about them rather than assuming they follow you or that they are lost. Your regional contractor is the office that can answer what happens to an existing authorization when you change regions, and TRICARE directs beneficiaries to their regional contractor when they need to change the provider on an authorization.

Practical order of operations: contact your previous regional contractor before you leave and ask what happens to any open referrals. After you arrive and update DEERS, enroll in Humana Military's beneficiary portal so the East Region has your information. Keep in mind that a specialty referral in your new location may be assigned to Womack Army Medical Center first if Womack can provide that care.

Your TRICARE coverage continues during your move -- do not disenroll from your current plan before you relocate. Your enrollment staying active is not the same as every visit being covered at your usual cost share, though: a Prime enrollee who gets non-emergency care outside their PCM and referral rules while in transit can still be billed at the point-of-service rate.

None of the waiting below applies to an emergency. If you reasonably believe you have one, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room, mid-move or not. TRICARE does not require a referral or pre-authorization first for emergency care, and there is no version of a PCM transfer that changes that.

Urgent care sits between those two, and the waiting period is not the rule there. TRICARE says beneficiaries other than active-duty service members can get urgent care from a TRICARE-authorized urgent care center or network provider without a referral. Active-duty members on Prime are told to use a military hospital or clinic, or to get an urgent-care referral from the MHS Nurse Advice Line at 800-874-2273, option 1, rather than sit out a confirmation window.

For routine care, wait for that confirmation before scheduling with the new provider, per the six-day note above. The point-of-service consequence TRICARE East attaches to it is a TRICARE Prime rule: Prime enrollees who see a provider outside the referral rules pay the higher point-of-service cost share. Active-duty service members sit under a stricter rule and can be left paying out of pocket, and TRICARE Select enrollees are not in the point-of-service scheme at all.