Description of Collaborative Activity: |
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has set a goal for the nationwide implementation of an interoperable health information technology infrastructure to improve the quality and efficiency of health care. Achieving this goal will require that key clinical data elements are captured or recorded in detailed, standardized form (using standard vocabularies, codes, and formats) as close to their original sources (patients, health care providers, laboratories, diagnostic devices, etc.) as possible. If these standardized clinical data can also be used to generate HIPAA- compliant billing transactions automatically, this will provide another incentive for adoption of clinical data standards. For automated generation of bills from clinical data to become a reality, robust mappings from standard clinical terminologies to the HIPAA code sets must be created. |
