AHIMA’s 2020 Advocacy Priorities
In 2020, in support of our vision of a world where trusted information transforms health and healthcare by connecting people, systems, and ideas, AHIMA will advocate for legislation and regulations in the following areas:
- Advance the quality of healthcare data by influencing the development and maintenance of national and international medical coding standards.
- Influence and advance standards based documentation and documentation integrity best practice to generate reliable and trusted information for care continuity, quality improvement, research, population health, reimbursement, and other purposes.
- Enhance consumers’ electronic, timely, and seamless access to their health information.
- Protect consumers by addressing existing privacy and security gaps in the protection of health information held by HIPAA non-covered entities.
- Advance health information sharing policies by aligning the 42 CFR Part 2 regulations which governs confidentiality and sharing of substance use disorder treatmen records with HIPAA, allowing for the appropriate sharing of substance use disorder treatment records for purposes of treatment, payment, and healthcare operations.
- Enhance and improve information sharing of cyber threats, risks, and cyber hygiene practices in real time.
- Repeal existing ban on the use of federal funds to promulgate or adopt a unique patient identifier (UPI) to enable HHS to identify a national solution to address patient misidentification.
- Champion a common set of data standards (including for application programming interfaces) and related infrastructure to ensure semantic, technical, and functional interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem.
- Enhance and influence efforts to improve the use of new approaches to better integrate clinical and administrative data through data standardization, standardized templates, improvements in technology, and electronic transmission of information.