Part III: Purpose & Maintenance

Purpose

Part I provides a general glossary of terms and acronyms likely to be encountered by anyone dealing with the Administrative Simplification portions of HIPAA, or with any of the organizations, standards, and processes involved in developing, maintaining, and using HIPAA-related standards.

It evolved from a glossary developed in the Summer of 1998 to support the development of the MOU covering the DSMO process within X12N/TG3/WG3. That MOU explains how the ADA, HHS, HL7, the NCPDP, the NUBC, the NUCC, and X12N will coordinate their efforts to develop and maintain the HIPAA-related standards and implementation guides. In such a setting it is possible to talk for several days without using a word of English, and this document was an attempt to compensate for that.

Part II provides a single source for all definitions included in the body of the final HIPAA Administrative Simplification rules, and should reflect the cumulative effects of all related rules and correction notices. Including the complete text of those definitions in this part keeps the Part I entries comparatively short and informal. Related definitions in Part I reference the associated Part II definitions.

Part III explains the purposes of Parts I & II, and provides you with a way to complain whenever you feel that your favorite organization or subject has been abused or neglected in those parts.

Maintenance

The contents are necessarily limited by the maintainers’ knowledge of and experience with the subjects and organizations included, and by the need to keep it finite. We have avoided including technical security-related terms beyond those needed to understand the rules themselves because there are so many of them, and because they are already fairly well documented by various industry and professional groups. When identifying organizations, we have tried to note when they have special responsibilities under HIPAA, such as the maintenance of a transaction standard or code set, or via the sponsorship of special educational programs.

Please send any suggestions or questions to zon4@earthlink.net.