RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – The North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, Inc and the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange Timeline Initiative has released its first estimated timeline database addressing proposed healthcare standards, regulations and other initiatives announced by federal agencies and national standards organizations.

The timeline estimates that implementation of the 5010 version of HIPAA transactions will be complete in 2014. The organizations note that this date is important because the ICD-10 clinical coding system cannot be used until 5010 transactions are implemented and can be processed using the ICD-10 codes. They say that project management software is being used to identify the critical issues that affect the implementation of 5010 transactions and may provide opportunities to shorten the time frame for implementation.

"It is important that organizations take a project management approach to implementing new federal regulations," said Holt Anderson, executive director of NCHICA. "Our estimate is based on the key assumption that a proposed rule on 5010 will be published in June 2008, and if only minor revisions are made, a final rule will be published in 2010. It is projected that it will take three years to move to limited production of new standards and one year to move to full compliance, bringing us to 2014."

WEDI and NCHICA have teamed to expand their joint work to include other regulations in future releases of the timeline, such as NCPDP D.0, e-prescribing, attachments and acknowledgements.

"It is our hope that organizations will download the timeline and modify it as needed to determine what they must do internally to implement new regulations," said WEDI executive vice president and CEO Jim Schuping. "This tool will help them see the steps needed and other dependencies that affect implementation dates. We hope to receive feedback that confirms or sheds new light on the underlying assumptions to further refine the estimated timeline."