Uniform ID card wins approval
Uniform ID card wins approval
The long journey toward establishing a standard Uniform Health Care Identification Card may finally be drawing to an end.
The Health Card Standard designed to support electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions by providing unique, accurate information in a standard format has been approved by the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS), according to Nancy Farrington, MBA, CHAM, who has led the National Association for Healthcare Access Management’s (NAHAM) efforts in support of the standardized card.
The next step is for the standard to go to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) offices in New York, where it will receive final editing and be checked to make sure ANSI rules and regulations have been followed, explains Farrington, who is MPI/CDR Administrator for Main Line Health System in Wynnewood, PA.
"It is anticipated that will take two to three months," she says. "We should have an official standard by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. The challenge at that time will be getting the information out and working with payers to gain compliance with the standard."
Part of the standard, Farrington notes, is a payer identifier that the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has been working on. "That is also proceeding well," she says.
Implementation of a uniform ID card will be a boon to access services in several ways, Farrington notes. "It will help speed up face-to-face registration and make it easier to gather information over the phone because the key data will be located in approximately the same place on all cards."
Additionally, she says, the uniform card will ensure that essential data like the billing address and the primary phone number for follow-up information are readily available for doing manual transactions.
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