THE HIGH COST OF HIPAA Final Edition

• Published in: Evansville courier & press
• Main Author: Dr. Les Nunn and, Dr. Brian L. McGuire
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Evansville, Ind Gannett Media Corp 04.08.2005
• ISSN: 1559-1581

In addition, a study by the American Hospital Association determined that hospitals (in total) could incur as much as $22.5 billion in additional costs complying with merely three of the privacy provisions of HIPAA during its initial five-year period. These costs are also significantly higher than the federal government's initial estimate of $3.8 billion estimated costs for compliance with all of the privacy regulations. With such dire projections, it is crucial that financial managers be able to forecast accurately the impact of HIPAA on their businesses. Although HIPAA was enacted in 1996, its delayed timeframes for compliance caused many health plans to be unprepared for the numerous regulations that affect all self-insured health plans. For example, one of the major mistakes that self-insured employers have made is underestimating the law's impact on their workers' compensation claims and other medical claims. Since HIPAA relates at the present time only to health (group benefits) programs and not specifically to workers' compensation claims, many employers are preparing their group benefit programs to be HIPAA-compliant only for employee information, privacy transmittals, and coded medical information. However, most medical providers are making all of their transmittals and medical information HIPAA-compliant in order to be cost-efficient in the processing of medical information. The result is that many self-insured worker's compensation programs will be required to send and receive all employee information and medical information to medical providers in a HIPAA-compliant format (even though workers' compensation is not technically covered by HIPAA).