Industries > Healthcare > HIPAA Solutions

The most sweeping legislation to affect the health care industry in over thirty years has recently been enacted. The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) is comprised of two major legislative actions: Health Insurance Act and Administrative Simplification. This Act requires that health care organizations make changes in their business operations and technology, so that uniform standards are followed across the industry. HIPAA establishes national standards for administrative health care transactions and unique identification numbers for providers and health plans. Additionally, health care entities must comply with new security rules to ensure that individually identifiable health care information and records are accessible only to authorized individuals. In addition to technology impacts, changes to core business processes will be necessitated, ranging from membership and provider operations to broker and trading partner relationships.

HIPAA compliance has real business implications beyond IT and electronic commerce. HIPAA is having an impact on systems, data structures, membership services, and provider operations. Knowledge Space International has invested a considerable amount of time in studying and analyzing HIPAA and is well positioned to offer HIPAA compliance solutions.

The major impact of administrative simplification procedures will occur in the information systems that an organization uses to deliver HealthCare solutions. The broad areas where IT is impacted are:

Applications capability of accepting new data needed in the format prescribed
Databases (Archived, Production, Recently used)
EDI software that translates application data into the formats prescribed by the Govt.
Communication systems in place. (Dialup, Leased, VPN)
Security systems

We follow a rigorous process to assist our clients in meeting their HIPAA defined requirements. The process chart that follows summarizes a typical engagement.