The Congress of the United States enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) on August 21, 1996. This law impacts all areas of the health care industry and was designed to provide insurance portability, to improve the efficiency of health care by standardizing the exchange of administrative and financial data, and to protect the privacy, confidentiality and security of patients' health care information. Relative to health care office management software, the HIPAA regulations specifically address the areas of:
- Electronic Transactions (October 2002)
- Transaction Code Set (October 2002)
- Security (April 2003)
- Privacy (April 2003)
Life Systems continues to closely monitor the evolution of HIPAA requirements for security and privacy. We are aware of the proposed security rule and have upgraded our software to ensure compliance, and will continue upgrades as it becomes necessary to meet deadlines.
Compliance with final HIPAA regulations requires a coordinated effort among the various vendors of a health care organization, including but not limited to office management software. All users should establish a vendor relationship with a HIPAA compliant electronic data interchange (EDI) vendor for ANSI X12 claim submission.
It is Life Systems’ policy to ensure both current (as of the October 15 Chiro Suite 2003 releases) and future compliance with all relevant HIPAA regulations, as they become effective. For software modifications of Life Systems software, we will provide these enhancements to all registered software licensees with current annual service agreements. Outside vendor relationships, such as clearinghouses for ANSI X12 claim submission, have fees associated with their services.
Extension:
We request that all practices using Life Systems products to file for the automatic one-year extension of the October 2002 transaction and code set requirement. This will protect you in the event that some of your payors fail to meet the deadline. To request the extension go to http://www.cms.gov/hipaa/.
