HIPAA Compliance

To address the high percentage of health care dollars spent on administrative overhead, the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was signed into law in August 1996. The law requires the Secretary of HHS to adopt uniform national standards for the electronic processing of insurance claims, protection of confidentiality, security of health data, and related transactions within 18 months of the law’s enactment. Health plans, providers, and insurers would then have 24 months to implement the standards. Small plans will have 36 months to implement the same standards.

The HIPAA legislation affected all areas of the healthcare industry:

• Transaction and data standards
  • Specifically, standardization of electronic patient health, administrative and financial data
• Privacy protection regulations
  • Specifically, unique health identifiers for individuals, employers, health plans and health care providers
• Security and confidentiality standards
  • Specifically, security standards protecting the confidentiality and integrity of "individually identifiable health information," past, present or future

Millennium Medical Billing and its clients are fully compliant with all HIPAA standards. We are constantly monitoring this legislation to determine appropriate adjustments needed to maintain compliance.