HIPAA Transactions in Dentistry

A primary goal of HIPAA is to maintain confidentiality of an individual's identifiable health information if it is transmitted by electronic means for administrative purposes.  The phrase, "identifiable health information," means the information itself can be directly or indirectly linked to a person.  Another goal of HIPAA is the establishment of commonality of the format used for administrative "transactions."  In order to accomplish this goal, the following terminology has emerged to facilitate communication between interested parties.

• "Electronic health transactions" refers to HIPAA mandated standards for key areas: identifiers, code sets, and those data constellations to be exchanged termed "transactions."
• "Vocabularies" are those actual terms associated with "codes" of code sets.
• "Codes" are compact unique identifiers for the concepts that both the human readable "terms" and the compact machine-readable "codes" represent.

The essential vocabularies used in the EOHR will be familiar to the dentist, but they must be complete and unambiguous before any coding schemes applied to them can serve the underlying purpose of conveying concepts from the care record for administrative purposes in a compact manner.  The continuing communication of the practicing dentist with the American Dental Association (ADA) Standards Committee on Dental Informatics (SCDI) will help ensure these vocabularies perform as the practitioner needs them to perform.

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Citation Number: Vol. 4, No. 4, Page 110