Analyzing HIPAA software for the new version could take years.
Raleigh, NC (PRWEB) September 26, 2008 — It has been more than a month since the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the Department of Health and Human Services released its final version of the HIPAA 5010 transaction definitions, leaving providers, payers and other health industry specialists scrambling to analyze the impact of these new transaction sets. In the meantime, software vendors have upgraded their HIPAA EDI packages, such as American Coders’ Open Business Objects for EDI (OBOE), to help their customers to quickly come up to speed in implementing the new 5010 messages.
Several groups of EDI specialist from government and industry worked on the requirement documents with a focus to correct old problems with the 4010 HIPAA messages, to address the low compliance rate and to help reduce communications between trading partners trying to resolve issues related to their HIPAA data. With improvements come change; Blue Cross Blue Sheld of Chicago estimates that the new standards contain over 850 individual changes. Some industry experts complain that the new messages do not resolve some of the old problems while they create new ones, such as incompatibilities with the new IDC-10 codes. To effectively make the transition from HIPAA 4010 to 5010 health industry IT professionals will need to analyze tens of thousands of lines of HIPAA programs thereby creating an extra burden on HIPAA users to use the new standards.
American Coders has developed new add-on tools to its EDI package, known as OBOE, to work with the HIPAA 5010 specifications. In addition, the company updated its free web-based HIPAA testing program to work with the new specifications.
For more information about Open Business Objects for EDI or American Coders’ free web-based HIPAA testing tool, readers can go to http://americancoders.com or contact Joe McVerry at 919.846.2014.