Reader Questions: Model business associate agreements will save work
Agreement should be ready well before deadline
Question: A while back, we heard that covered entities under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that were accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations would need to come up with a business associate agreement. But then we heard that we shouldn’t do any work on this because the Joint Commission was coming up with a generic agreement that would cover accredited providers. Is that true? We haven’t heard anything and don’t want to miss any deadlines.
Answer: The agreement is not ready yet, but you have plenty of time. The Joint Commission reports that the model business associate agreement will be ready well before the April 2003 deadline. If you use it instead of coming up with your own, you won’t need to do much work and can wait until just before the deadline, the Joint Commission reports. The model agreement is supposed to be a simple solution to the HIPAA requirement. The Joint Commission says the model agreement can be used as a template when accredited organizations put together the appropriate paperwork to comply with the new rule.
Margaret Van Amringe, vice president of external relations at the Joint Commission, tells Hospital Peer Review that the model agreement is necessary because the HIPAA rule considers accreditors such as the Joint Commission to be business associates of the accredited organizations.
The HIPAA rule requires the Joint Commission to have business associate agreements with each accredited organization, specifying its own privacy and disclosure practices and how it will handle information that is identifiable by patient name.
Since there are almost 20,000 Joint Commission-accredited organizations, Van Amringe says it is unreasonable to have a different agreement for each one. The model agreement is meant to simplify the situation.
You could write your own business associate agreements from scratch, or you could use one developed by a private consultant or another organization. But the Joint Commission urges you to use the model it releases to minimize the customization and the time needed to review each agreement.
All accredited organizations should receive the model business associate agreement by the end of 2002, and they must be signed by the April 2003 deadline, Van Amringe says.
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