Baltimore
Beginning Oct. 1, CMS will no longer process claims not compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the agency announced last month.
The original deadline for HIPAA-compliant transactions — designed to allow for interoperability among payers and providers by generating identical claims using standard formats and coding — was Oct. 16, 2003. But the enforcement plan was delayed because only about 31 percent of Medicare claims were compliant at the time.
CMS no longer accepts paper claims from most providers, but will continue to accept claims with non-HIPAA compliant code sets until October.
Now it appears that most health care providers are on board. As of June, only about 0.5 percent of Medicare fee-for-service providers submitted non-HIPAA-compliant electronic claims, according to CMS.
