Administrative Simplification: Adoption of Standards for Health Care Attachments Transactions and Electronic Signatures, and Modification to Referral Certification and Authorization Transaction Standard

This rule would implement requirements of the Administrative Simplification subtitle of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, enacted on March 30, 2010--collectively, the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, this proposed rule would adopt standards for "health care attachments" transactions, which would support both health care claims and prior authorization transactions, and a standard for electronic signatures to be used in conjunction with health care attachments transactions. To better support the use of the proposed standards for attachments transactions with prior authorization transactions, this rule also proposes to adopt a modification to the standard for the referral certification and authorization transaction (X12 278) to move from Version 5010 to Version 6020.