Report urges funding for HIPAA provisions.

A recent report says Congress should fully fund the implementation of provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and encourages the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to speed up the process of releasing the final HIPAA regulations.

The report, submitted to Congress annually by the National Committee on Vital Health and Statistics, indicates that "significant progress occurred on several HIPAA Administrative Simplification standards during the past year," but it concludes that the full economic benefits of the Administrative Simplification provisions will only be realized when all the standards are enacted. The Administrative Simplification provisions of HIPAA require HHS to adopt a variety of standards to support electronic interchange for administrative and financial healthcare transactions, including standards for security and privacy to protect individually identifiable health information. In addition, the statute gives expanded responsibilities to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics for advising the HHS secretary on health information privacy and on the adoption of health data standards.

The Congressional Research Service has also made available a report, "Hurricane Katrina: HIPAA Privacy and Electronic Health Records of Evacuees" discussing HHS' waiver of certain provisions of the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the compliance and enforcement guidance issued by HHS after the storm.