HIPAA, 10 Years After

Whether good or bad, for the past 10 years HIPAA has made an indelible mark on the healthcare landscape.

HIPAA started out in 1995 as simply the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, named for senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) and Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan). It?s recognized primarily for its three main provisions: (1) promoting electronic transmission standards for claims data; (2) regulating the privacy of electronic medical records; and (3) regulating the security of medical data storage and transmission.

ModernHealthcare.com has a retrospective, of sorts, of the sometimes controversial healthcare bill. (Registration required).

HIPAA isn?t without its detractors: ?From my microscopic point of view, from within the hospital, it’s certainly gotten people to focus on protection of patient privacy and confidentially more than they did,” Kenneth Ong, a physician and the director of medical informatics at St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, said. “I’m not sure the benefit outweighs the cost here in our own hospitals or nationally.”

But, as the article shows, HIPAA has some benefits: “We’ve seen a significant reduction in the denials of claims we send out because we’ve done an eligibility check,” Jim Whicker, director of electronic data interchange at Intermountain Healthcare system, said. “Since about a third of our denials had been related to coverage issues, we’ve eliminated that. I can see correlations to implementing part of the HIPAA transactions (standards) and decreases in our accounts receivable.”