The administrative simplification portion of the HIPAA legislation was intended to modernize healthcare transactions by creating a uniform data exchange that could be implemented by all healthcare business partners. As a result, new EDI transaction standards like 837 (claims) and 835 (payments) were introduced. In addition to this, HIPAA also called for standardizing specific code sets in these transactions that were previously unique by health plan. Most of these changes were quickly adopted by healthcare business partners who were eager to find common ground.
However, there have been a few significant exceptions. It took several years for health plans to give up their own unique codes used to identify healthcare providers and replace them with the standard NPI (National Provider Identifier). Now, NPI is used by all healthcare business partners for identifying providers electronically and this advancement alone has made systems using this data more efficient and easier to maintain. HIPAA included two other mandatory numeric ID code sets that were to replace any existing proprietary counterparts used for the same purpose. These two code sets are the Health Plan Identifier (HPID) and the National Patient Identifier (also NPI). Neither of these have been implemented, but for different reasons. In this article, we will review the current status of the HPID.

The drafted HPID code set system designated that all health plans fell into categories, controlling health plans, small controlling health plans, and sub health plans. This lead to confusion about what these terms meant and which category was to be used by a specific health plan. The most compelling issue blocking the implementation of this code set was the fact that the payer ID system used then and today is universally accepted by healthcare business partners conducting transactions that require the numeric identification of health plans. Continue reading →
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