A new twist in US health care data standards development: adoption of electronic health care transactions standards for administrative simplification.

To reduce the costs of common administrative transactions, health plans, payers and providers encouraged the US Congress to legislate administrative simplification of specific electronic health data transactions. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 created incentives for a public-private partnership to develop and implement standards for the uniformity of health care data used in electronic administrative health transactions and standards for the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information. The standards' requirements of HIPAA and how they have been met by the US government hold promise for accelerating the uniform adoption of standards developed by accredited standards developing organizations. The transactions designated by Congress, the process of choosing the standards in the Department of Health and Human Services, the principles that guided these choices, and the actual choices, are presented here. A successful partnership for administrative health data standards can pave the way for success in clinical health data standards and their application in computer-based patient record systems.