Most healthcare organizations are not prepared for the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, according to consulting firm Gartner Group. The first of those regulations, standardizing electronic healthcare administrative and financial transactions, was finalized and signed by the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, on August 11.
The regulations will be finalized by August 17. Most healthcare organizations will then have 26 months to comply. However, most organizations have not completed even basic preparations for HIPAA, according to initial research for Gartner’s five-level HIPAA compliance, progress, and readiness (COMPARE) scale, said Matt Duncan, research director at the Stamford, CT-based consulting firm.
Gartner first employed the COMPARE scale in 1997 as a tool for tracking an enterprise's progress with year 2000 compliance. Now the company has adapted the COMPARE methodology to create a set of milestones that measure a healthcare organization's progress toward compliance with the HIPAA-mandated regulations.
August 16, 2000
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