Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

ESN has been providing IT solutions to the healthcare industry for several years. We have watched with interest the evolution of the HIPAA legislation since it was introduced in 1996 and have studied the impacts it will have on the way the healthcare industry does business. ESN has always been a company that embraces standards and we support the intent and benefits that HIPAA will bring.

Change however, does not always come easily. We understand that compliance to HIPAA may be confusing and difficult for your organization. The major components of HIPAA are being completed — these include:

• Electronic Health Transaction Standards
• Unique Identifiers
• Security and Electronic Signature Standards
• Privacy and Confidentiality Standards

With the Privacy Rule and Transaction Sets now being finalized, a compliance timeframe is becoming clear (April 2003 for the Privacy Rules). ESN offers several ways to help your organization understand and implement the new requirements mandated by HIPAA.

ESN can offer help at all levels of your HIPAA compliance effort:

• High-level Healthcare Business Consultants who can provide GAP analysis for your organization to determine what needs to be done to meet HIPAA requirements.
• High-level IT Consultants who can develop a plan and design for changes to your hardware and software infrastructure that will help you integrate a scalable, compliant solution into your current environment.
• Software Development resources that can perform the required coding and testing to implement the needed changes to meet compliance. Our breadth and depth of knowledge on a variety of development environments allows us to bring solutions to heterogeneous IT environments.