HIPAA 5010 – Tactical vs. Strategic Implementation
Cheapest option to compliance – who wouldn’t be interested? Especially in an industry that potentially spends more than a quarter trillion dollars per year on regulations. In the case of HIPAA 5010, developing just the ability to send and receive 5010 transactions will achieve basic compliance and is arguably the cheapest option. I wouldn’t be too hasty to call the organizations that plan for basic compliance as short-sighted, but at the same time I’d recommend that organizations at the very least perform an assessment before heading that path.
Converters are one option to achieve basic compliance. Implementing a step-down converter for inbound files and step-up converter for outbound files, right at the gateway will allow you to keep your internal processes unchanged and achieve compliance.
Updating the front end systems to map the new 5010 files to the as-is database schemas is a little more strategic than converters, but still not strategic enough to realize the benefits of 5010.
These tactical options sound appealing at the first glance, but the devil lies in the detail. Either option can’t guarantee that your backend systems won’t need any change at all. You’ll need to analyze each change in 5010 closely to find out if you can do without any backend change. After an assessment, you might just find out that the tactical solutions are nearly as expensive as the strategic solution.
The strategic solution would entail assessment and remediation of the impact on all the frontend and backend systems. This option will be expensive, but will also avoid applying short-term band aids that eventually make the systems inflexible and expensive to maintain.
All in all, a detailed assessment should be performed to find out which option is better for your organization. Even if you choose to implement a tactical solution, the detailed assessment report will help your testing phase and will serve as a reference if you decide to update your backend systems at some point in the future.
