The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a complex set of regulations involving technology, industry standards, and business rules. It is not an easy task to become "HIPAA Ready." The assessment involves transactions, privacy, and security. Complete implementation involves integrating HIPAA transactions into your back-end applications.

The HIPAA Assessment

Establishing a benchmark for your organization’s ability to implement HIPAA is called a HIPAA Assessment. Data Integration Specialists provides experienced healthcare business/technology consultants to conduct a full examination of your organization’s internal and external processes. This assessment identifies business processes, methods, and will provide you with a step-by-step action plan.

The Data Integration Specialists’ philosophy is ideally suited for the assessment program. The HIPAA Assessment is a measurable, finite, well defined objective that is conducted by top talent in the field of healthcare electronic data interchange. The deliverable to you is:

• HIPAA Readiness Review that specifies areas of HIPAA compliance by degree of readiness to implement the regulations
• Steps to HIPAA Compliance Report that details tasks necessary to "Go Live" with HIPAA
• Review covers X12, HL7, and NCPDP standards for transactions
• Security, Privacy, and Transaction areas are part of the assessment

This detailed assessment session is the reference point for your organization to launch into HIPAA. It will cover all the major areas and go in-depth with items like transaction sets and trading partner set-up.

For example, testing for enrollment, claims status, and payments all have a specific standard to follow. In addition, each partner with whom you trade information may have a unique subset of those standards. In the end, HIPAA is something best undertaken with a partner.