Research and Development in NICHSR

Health Data Standards and Privacy

The passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) assigned to the Secretary of Health and Human Services a major role in the promulgation of health data, security, and privacy standards for administrative transactions, including claims attachments that may have extensive clinical information. The Act also requires HHS and the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics to advise the Congress on any legislative or regulatory actions needed to promote full electronic medical records. The HHS Data Council is responsible for implementing these administrative simplification provisions of the law, acting through its Health Data Standards and Privacy Committees. NLM serves on both of these committees and co-chairs the implementation team focused on codes, classifications, and vocabulary.

NLM is participating in the Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) initiative working to establish a portfolio of existing clinical vocabularies and messaging standards to enable federal agencies to build interoperable federal health data systems.

In collaboration with other Federal agencies, NLM supports the continuing development and free distribution of LOINC (Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes) a coding system being proposed as a HIPAA standard for some elements of claims attachments.

NLM commissioned and was the principal funder (in collaboration with the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium) of the National Research Council study For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information, which serves as the basis for the proposed HIPAA security standard. Privacy and Health Research, another study commissioned by HHS, specifically addresses electronic data privacy issues that have an impact on clinical and health services research.

Current information on HIPAA standards may be found on the HHS Administrative Simplification Web site.

UMLS

NICHSR participates in the development of the Unified Medical Language System® and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).

Grants

The NLM Extramural Programs issues research grants and informatics training fellowships including some related to health services research.

Contracts

The Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program funds many contracts of interest to the HSR community.

Last updated: 29 April 2004
First published: 01 January 1998
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