HIPAA-AS Resource Center

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Note: the material on this Web site is not legal advice and should not be used as legal advice. If you need legal advice upon which you can rely, we recommend you consult your attorney.

What is HIPAA-AS?

When the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law in August of 1996, most people focused on its portability requirements. The law, originally known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act or Kassebaum-Kennedy Act (depending on your political party), focused on protecting workers who changed jobs against loss of health insurance coverage or from being subject to new health insurance coverage exclusions for pre-existing medical conditions.

But HIPAA also included new provisions addressing health care fraud and abuse, revisions to the federal tax code and what the act calls "administrative simplification." Wellmark has completed implementation of these requirements.

Administrative Simplification - What is it?
The express purposes of administrative simplification (HIPAA-AS) are to:

1) to reduce the costs of health insurance;
2) to simplify the electronic processing of health insurance claims through standardization of how those claims are processed electronically; and
3) to set standards and ensure the confidentiality and security of individually identifiable protected health information (PHI).