Gartner Sees Delays In HIPAA Data Standards Compliance

By Staff Writer

July 26, 2001 at 08:00 PM

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Gartner Inc. says only 15% of the health care providers it surveyed have completed the tests needed to comply with health data communications provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

The HIPAA provisions and related regulations are supposed to create a standardized, electronic system for transmitting information about health insurance transactions.

Gartner, a Stamford, Conn., technology research firm, began conducting quarterly HIPAA surveys in late 2000, to see how the health care industry was responding to the transaction standards provisions.

Sixty-eight percent of the participants in the latest survey said doubts about the ultimate compliance deadlines, and doubts about whether HIPAA itself is here to stay, have had a significant effect on their organizations' progress, Gartner says.

Gartner is recommending that the government give health care organizations an extra year before requiring them to accept standardized transactions.

Health care organizations were supposed to begin accepting "standardized transactions" in 2002. Pushing the transaction deadline back to Oct. 16, 2003, should give these organizations enough time to implement the new standards, Gartner says.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, July 27, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

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