GOVERNMENTWeak response to deadline spells HIPAA trouble aheadDoctors are unsure about the next step in the move toward electronic transmission standards.By Markian Hawryluk, amednews staff. Nov. 4, 2002. Washington -- A lackluster response to the first major milestone in the implementation of new federal electronic health transmission standards shows just how unprepared many physicians and others are for meeting the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. "This is very complicated," said David Kibbe, MD, director of health information technology for the American Academy of Family Physicians. "People aren't ready and are struggling with the complexity." According to a spokesperson from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, about 550,000 health care organizations filed for a one-year extension for complying with the electronic transmission standards by the Oct. 15 deadline. This represents much less than half of the entities governed by the regulation. CMS had previously estimated that there were more than 2 million physician practices and other groups impacted by the law. But even the agency is unsure how many of those are exempt because they are too small or how many decided to become compliant this year. Practices with fewer than 10 full-time employees that do not submit electronic transactions will not be required to comply. The fate of those who did not file is still unclear. CMS is prohibited by law from accepting any more requests for extensions and has removed the extension application from its Web site. In theory, physicians who did not file for an extension were required to be in compliance with the new standards after Oct. 16. CMS has been charged with oversight of all the non-privacy portions of HIPAA. But the agency has said it will take a complaint-driven approach to enforcing the transmission standards. Even when a complaint is filed, agency officials said, CMS will seek to "bring that group into the fold" rather than make use of the noncompliance penalties included in the law.
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Copyright 2002 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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