What’s New
CHITA Forum on Health Care Information in WA State
With the current work in our state around the Health Information Infrastructure and Advisory Board (HIIAB) and Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration Project (HISPC) CHITA welcomes the opportunity to inform and increase communication among the many parties involved in health information exchange in Washington State.
CHITA would like to thank all the attendees who joined us for our May 2007 CHITA Forum at the Renaissance Seattle Hotel to hear from national experts and representatives from Washington State on the plan to design and establish a competitive health record bank model, including featured speakers Kelly Cronin, Director, Office of Programs and Coordination, and Linda Kloss, CEO, of the American Health Information Management Association.
CHITA is pleased to offer some selected materials and presentations for download on our CHITA Forums page.
Alphabet Soup: The New CHITA Workgroup
Juggling HIPAA with other regulations? Performing multiple surveys of all your systems? Audits that never end? Let's work together to simplify it all!
There are a wide variety of standards imposed on health care organizations today. Each standard is slightly different than the rest but they do contain some common elements.
CHITA has chartered a workgroup to compare the various standards to each other. The goal is to develop a tool that would compare the various standards to each other in order to understand which imposes the strictest requirements.
Please contact us for more information on participating...
Click here for links to some resources.
Guidance on Compliance with the HIPAA National Provider Identifier (NPI) Rule
AFTER THE MAY 23, 2007, IMPLEMENTATION DEADLINE
To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system, Congress enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, which included a series of “administrative simplification” provisions that required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to adopt national standards for electronic health care transactions and code sets and identifiers to be used in those transactions. The final rule adopting the NPI as the standard unique health identifier for health care providers was published on January 23, 2004, and became effective on May 23, 2005. All covered entities must be in compliance with the NPI provisions by May 23, 2007, except for small plans, which must be in compliance by May 23, 2008.
Compliance means in part that the NPI must be used by covered entities to identify providers on all HIPAA covered transactions that call for health care provider identifiers. Covered transactions that require a health care provider’s identifier that are transmitted containing only legacy identifiers (identifiers in use today) or containing both legacy identifiers and NPIs would be noncompliant.
The NPI final rule is clear: May 23, 2007 is the final deadline for covered entities, other than small plans, to comply with HIPAA’s NPI provisions. After that date, covered entities, including health plans (other than small health plans), may not conduct noncompliant transactions. With the May 2007 deadline just ahead, HHS has received a number of inquiries expressing concern over the health care industry’s state of readiness. In response, the Department believes it is particularly important to outline its approach to enforcement of HIPAA’s NPI provisions. The Department will continue to provide technical assistance to the industry and issue guidance on the NPI provisions and compliance requirements. Click here for more information about Enforcement...
Need the DHS recommended taxonomy codes to use with your NPI when submitting claims? Click here for a Taxonomy Code Crosswalk.
For the October 2006 CHITA Forum, we partnered with the Oregon and Southwest Washington Healthcare, Privacy and Security Forum to offer an all-day forum to hear from experts on planning requirements and implementation details required for NPI!
Visit our CHITA Forums page now to view selected presentations for download!
