Our healthcare system is in critical condition; its costs are out of control, and it's failing to keep us healthy. Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy and we spend twice as much per person to pay for a health care system that ranks last of all industrialized nations. Finally, Congress and the Administration are hard at work to reform the entire healthcare system, and they understand that it cannot be done without HIT; paper systems can never solve these problems!

Higher quality, lower cost healthcare can result only if we incorporate interoperable health information exchange and standardized, secure electronic communications of administrative and clinical transactions. HIPAA started the ball rolling in this direction 13 years ago by requiring standards for administrative transactions, code sets, identifiers, security, and privacy. This year, in addition to putting ONC into law and providing the funding and impetus to roll out EHR systems and incorporate clinical information exchanges, the HITECH Act (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) forces HIPAA covered entities to move to ICD-10 coding and an updated version of the transaction standards. It also ramped up the HIPAA requirements for privacy and security and charged the Secretary of HHS to undertake "...the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure that allows for the electronic use and exchange of information and that ensures that each patient's health information is secure and protected...". Impending healthcare reform legislation is likely to include requirements to push the industry even further in this direction. Just when we thought that HIPAA was almost over, it has been resuscitated!

These developments will affect most aspects of healthcare and everyone connected professionally with healthcare will want to understand these changes and what will be required. The HIPAA Summit will provide the most up-to-date information on the status and schedule for the regulations through presentations by the leading regulators from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office for Civil Rights. Private sector leaders will add practical advice from their experiences in implementations. The Summit will also include training sessions for HIPAA privacy and security professionals who wish to apply for certification.