Rule Might Make HIPAA More Costly Than ICD-10

By Greg Bengel, contributing writer

The proposed Accounting of Disclosures provision, if finalized, could cost providers a startling amount of money

Health IT Outcomes recently reported that providers will spend nearly 33 million hours complying with HIPAA rules. Now new information has come to light, which indicates that the HIPAA drain on providers will be plenty of dollars as well. And potentially, much more significant amounts of both than were originally expected.

According to an article in Medical Practice Insider, a key provision of HIPAA still being discussed – the Accounting of Disclosures provision – could “trigger a colossal drain on resources and cost far more than previously anticipated.” How much more? The article says that this provision could cost practices more than ICD-10 implementation.

That’s quite a lot of money, as MGMA estimates that ICD-10 will cost even the small practices approximately $85,000.

You can read the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking here on federalregister.gov. Also, read the HHS press release here.

MGMA senior policy advisor Robert Tennant said that if the rule is finalized, it would mean “for anyone who handled a [patient’s] bill or looked at a record, that information would have to be captured, stored and presented to the patient over a period of up to three years.” He also called the provision “potentially one of the most onerous regulations we’ve seen.”

Medical Practice Insider explains that under the HITECH Act, people have the right to receive information about any disclosures made for implementing treatment, payment and other healthcare operations through a covered entity’s EHR. This, the article says, requires the HHS Secretary, to “balance the interests of individuals in learning about these disclosures with the administrative burden on HIPAA covered entities to track the disclosures.” The article very rightly points out that this balance is a very difficult one to strike.

But again, this is if the rule is finalized. The article quotes MGMA Senior Counsel Amy Nordeng, who has some potential good news for providers. According to Nordeng, many people have serious objections and OCR is listening. An MGMA questionnaire about the rule, she says, elicited “possibly our largest response ever, over 1,400 members, who had concerns about the proposed rule.” She says that OCR “potentially had gone back to the drawing board.” Further, the article explains that OCR is investigating the provision via a request for information.