Newsletter: April 2024 Issue

APRIL 2024

This month we announced our affiliation with Comagine Health and added new CHIE data sources from CommonSpirit Health. We look forward to growing with our new strategic partners, customers, and you! Keep reading for what else happened in April and what’s coming up next month.​​​​​​

P.S. Follow our LinkedIn page for more frequent news, posts and insights


“Aligning our health care knowledge and expertise through affiliation is a profound opportunity to advance our parallel missions, while delivering greater success to our customers and partners. We have collaborated successfully for more than a decade. As affiliates, UHIN and Comagine Health can serve as a unified force for change in health care for the foreseeable future.”

​​​​​​- Brian Chin, UHIN’s Chief Executive Officer

Keep scrolling for more information on our affiliation.


Comagine logo, UHIN logo, Comagine and UHIN affiliation announcement

We have announced our official affiliation with Comagine Health, a national nonprofit healthcare consulting firm. We have a long history of working together over the last decade on federal and state initiatives to advance electronic health record (EHR) adoption, cost transparency reporting, capacity and functionality of all-payer claims databases (APCDs) and interoperability and surveillance activities. Combining our technology solutions and Comagine Health’s analytic services will enable more actionable health insights and more sustainable, transformational improvements for communities.​​​​​​


CommonSpirit health logo, UHIN logo, New data source CommonSpirit Health

The CHIE continues to add important data sources, providing healthcare professionals with vital medical information when it is needed most. Recently, we’ve onboarded CommonSpirit Health as a data source.


WEDI spring conference

We’re attending the WEDI Spring Conference from May 13 – 16 (virtually). We look forward to learning more from experts, like Aneesh Chopra, about solutions to improve information exchange, enhance care quality, and reduce cost and burden. 

Are you planning to attend online, too?


In addition to online product trainings for our customers, we’re preparing virtual payer panels for later this year. These will be similar to the payer panels you may have attended in previous years at the HIT Conference.


We’re reading the recent CAQH report on the wide differences in administrative transaction costs for generalists, specialists and behavioral health providers. “The medical industry spends an astonishing $83 billion annually on staff time to conduct routine administrative transactions between providers and health plans during and after a patient-provider encounter. Providers shoulder 97 percent of these costs.”



Newsletter: March 2024 Issue

MARCH 2024

“Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Such was life in the healthcare information technology sector this month. We collectively faced daunting cyber circumstances and peered into an optimistic future filled with the possibilities of A.I., resilient and redundant networks, and healthcare interoperability for all.


Cyberattacks affect all of us. We're here to help.

UHIN is dedicated to maintaining interoperability for all payers, providers and partners. When an event as large as the Change Healthcare cyber incident impacts our community, we know we need to serve as a bridge to stable ground. Read more about the actions we’re taking to support our community at this time.


We’re actively supporting Providers by expediting enrollment with Payers to get claims flowing again. Providers can leverage our solutions to create and send professional and institutional claims, submit via SFTP, file tool or online hand-entry, check claims status, manage denials and rejections, and search, view, and download payment information.

We can connect with health plans, so they may receive claims from providers through a direct connection to our clearinghouse. Empower your provider network by elevating your collaboration efforts, securely sharing information and data, and providing better affordable care for your members.​​​​​​


Typing on computers

The alarming rise in cyber threats – namely ransomware – highlight the urgent need for enhanced cyber resiliency and robust security measures in healthcare. Read our recent blog post with five ways to reduce your risk and secure personal health information (PHI) from cyberattacks.


HIMSS shared their recap of the 2024 Global Health Conference & Exhibition (March 11-15 in Orlando). Cybersecurity, A.I.,and health equity and access to care delivery were big themes this year. What were you most excited to learn at HIMSS this year?


We’re preparing a series of online trainings for CHIE users this year. Explore our new platform and share feedback with our HIT experts. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming trainings.


Comagine Health logo

Comagine Health President and CEO Marc Bennett addresses how the organization has been managing competing tensions while building partnerships to serve as a prime contractor for the 13th Statement of Work in the Midwest CMS QIN-QIO Region 6.



Newsletter: February 2024 Issue

February 2024 Newsletter

February 2024

Thanks for spending this extra day going around the sun with us. In February, we dove into the 2023 CAQH Index Report and prepared for the CHIE’s migration to a new platform.

One more thing: For our providers experiencing disruptions in their claims management due to the Change cyberattack, we’re here to help. Please contact us to fast track your enrollment with payers at customersuccess@uhin.org.


American Heart Month

In February we recognized Black History Month and American Heart Month. Here are just a couple ways to support and celebrate these causes throughout the entire year:

For health care professionals and clinicians, use the resources in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) heart toolkit to support their patients, especially women, by listening to their heart.

In Utah? Dive into Utah’s rich black history at the Utah Black History Museum! Find the mobile exhibit across Utah this year or consider donating.​


CHIE platform

The new platform empowers CHIE users to better understand patient populations, provide greater care, reduce waste while improving quality, and pinpoint at-risk patients to intervene before their next encounter.

After consulting with our community’s advisory committee, we will be migrating five years of data with the exception of opt out consents, immunizations, allergies, and colonoscopies for which a longer history will be migrated.

Technical implementation is currently underway and we anticipate user migrations will start in Q2 of 2024. We will keep all CHIE users informed of our progress via email.


Copyright CAQH

We published two blog posts sharing our thoughts on the most recent CAQH Index released earlier this month. How did electronic transaction adoption and healthcare administration change in 2023 for both providers and payers? Keep reading to find out.


Our CEO, Brian Chin, recently attended ViVe 2024. Artificial Intelligence was a hot topic this year, as you may have expected. Check out a few photos from the conference here.

Are you going to HIMSS 2024? Let us know what you’re most excited to see while in Orlando next month at communications@uhin.org.


We have online trainings coming up for the new CHIE platform. Please sign up for CHIE updates and our Events notifications to add these to your calendar so you don’t miss a thing!


Do you have something your peers in healthcare and tech just have to know about? An innovative interoperability solution or point of view? Please email us at communications@uhin.org and we’ll include links to our favorite community content each month.

Next month we’ll attend HIMSS 2024 and help to raise awareness of the risks and symptoms of diabetes on American Diabetes Alert Day (March 26). 


A New Era for Data Interoperability

The CHIE is moving to a new FHIR®-enabled platform in 2024.

The new platform empowers CHIE users to better understand patient populations, provide greater care, reduce waste while improving quality, and pinpoint at-risk patients to intervene before their next encounter. The enhanced user experience will put data at your fingertips and our FHIR®-native exchange streamlines data sharing while preparing you for future requirements.

After consulting with our community’s advisory committee, we will be migrating five years of data with the exception of opt out consents, immunizations, allergies, and colonoscopies for which a longer history will be migrated. Technical implementation is currently underway and we anticipate user migrations will start in Q2 of 2024. We will keep all CHIE users informed of our progress via email.

CHIE Portal users will see the greatest updates in a modern user interface that offers access to Health Information Exchange (HIE) data through FHIR® standards. Portal users will be able to search and view patient data, and results notifications, as well as waste and quality measures. Users will be able to configure their dashboard to optimize workflows.

Keep reading about the migration, including all the enhancements you can expect here.


Important Updates to the UHIN Requirements

This notice is to inform you of important updates to the UHIN Requirements. The UHIN Requirements are the standards, specifications, policies, procedures, and guidelines that apply to the UHIN Network. All UHIN members contractually agree to comply with the UHIN Requirements (and changes thereto) as part of their participation in the UHIN Network and their use of UHIN’s clearinghouse, clinical health information exchange (CHIE), and related services. 

The UHIN Board of Directors—which is comprised of community stakeholders from the Utah healthcare community—recently approved the addition of a Member Policies and Procedures Manual (Version 1) (the “Member Manual”) to the UHIN Requirements. The Member Manual supports our community’s compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act interoperability mandates as well as health information privacy, security and breach notification laws. The updated UHIN Requirements may be found at https://support.uhin.org/s/article/Member-Policies-And-Procedures-Manual

The Member Manual includes the following policies applicable to all members:

  • Data Submission Policy
  • Security Specifications and Network Maintenance Policy
  • Security Event Reporting Policy
  • Minimum Necessary Procedure
  • Individual Rights Policy

The Member Manual also contain the following CHIE specific policies to support compliance with the federal prohibition on information blocking:

  • The CHIE No Information Blocking Policy
  • The CHIE Notice and Opt Out Policy
  • The CHIE Permitted Purpose Policy, including expanded permitted purposes that fully support HIPAA-permitted treatment, payment and health care operation activities of health care providers and health plans, as well as UHIN’s uses of CHIE data to support limited public health activities, research and data analytic services (collectively, the “Expanded Permitted Purposes”).  

The Member Manual is effective as of January 1, 2024. 

For organizations or agencies that have, may, or are a CHIE data supplier: pursuant to our current contract, CHIE members who make clinical data available through the CHIE must consent to the Expanded Permitted Purposes. Please sign and return the attached form indicating your affirmative consent to the Expanded Permitted Purposes no later than January 1, 2024. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOUR ORGANIZATION’S OR AGENCY’S CONTINUED PARTICIPATION IN THE UHIN NETWORK AFTER JANUARY 1, 2024 CONSTITUTES YOUR ORGANIZATION’S OR AGENCY’S IMPLIED CONSENT TO THE EXPANDED PURPOSES. IF YOUR ORGANIZATION OR AGENCY DOES NOT CONSENT TO THE EXPANDED PERMITTED PURPOSES, YOU MUST SEND UHIN YOUR WRITTEN NOTICE OF INTENT TO TERMINATE PARTICIPATION IN THE UHIN NETWORK NO LATER THAN JANUARY 1, 2024.   

If you have any questions please contact us at customersupport@uhin.org.


Health and Tech Professionals Gather Once Again at the 2023 HIT Conference

Our annual Health Information Technology Conference (HIT) will return to Salt Lake on Wednesday, October 18 at the Conference Center at Gail Miller Campus, SLCC. This year, we’ll look towards the “future of healthcare interoperability” with speakers, leaders and professionals from across the healthcare and technology continuum. While we will also celebrate the fact that 2023 marks our 30th year as an innovative organization, we will keep our focus on what’s coming up in the world of healthcare and technology. Some of our most exciting topics include:

  • Artificial Intelligence in healthcare
  • Billing for today and beyond
  • Cybersecurity
  • Digital transformation in healthcare
  • Documentation burden
  • HL7 and FHIR
  • Health equity
  • Health Data Utilities (HDUs)
  • Medicare updates
  • Mental health and burn out
  • Population Health
Dr. Angela Dunn

Dr. Angela Dunn, Executive Director of the Salt Lake County Health Department, will deliver our welcome keynote address in the morning.

Joy Rios

Joy Rios, founder and host of the HIT Like a Girl podcast, will present the afternoon keynote address.

We look forward to seeing you on October 18th!


How Does Your EDI Partner Stack Up? (Part 4 of 4)

Doctor at laptop

4 Questions to Ask

Question 4: How Does Your EDI Partner Reduce the Burden of Claims Submission for Providers?

Plan members want access to a range of high- quality providers. Without a robust provider network, health plans are challenged to grow membership and differentiate themselves from competitors.

The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) 2022 Index reported that providers spend ten minutes submitting a single electronic claim on average. For paper, it’s 22 minutes. A large part of this is repetitive data entry. These time blocks add up to significant resource drains in a typical day. Alleviating stressors will reduce payer-provider friction and promote cooperation in your common goal to improve health outcomes for members.

With the right EDI partner, you can streamline operations, reduce administrative burden, and improve your organization’s bottom line. Embracing new technologies and cooperative partnerships can help you gain a competitive advantage and, ultimately, provide better care to members.

Our fourth and final question leads you to ask yourself: “Is my EDI partner providing holistic support to my partner’s and my own organization’s operations?”

White paper

Ready to jump to all four questions? Want to see how your EDI partner stacks up? Download our white paper here.

How Does Your EDI Partner Reduce the Burden of Claims Submission for Providers?

Plan members want access to a range of high- quality providers. Without a robust provider network, health plans are challenged to grow membership and differentiate themselves from competitors.

The healthcare industry is becoming more consumer-driven and labor shortages continue to mount. Health plans need to be mindful of provider relationships and the administrative burdens your claims processing may be placing on them.

The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) 2022 Index reported that providers spend ten minutes submitting a single electronic claim on average. For paper, it’s 22 minutes. A large part of this is repetitive data entry. These time blocks add up to significant resource drains in a typical day. Alleviating stressors will reduce payer-provider friction and promote cooperation in your common goal to improve health outcomes for members.

Your healthcare EDI partner should help you to help providers with an affordable billing tool. Our solution, MYUHIN, reduces repetitive data-entry, and solidifies coding and submissions data to satisfy your processing requirements. Providers can use MYUHIN to submit claims, check patient eligibility, and search, view, and download payment information from any computer, any where.

UHIN is a national EDI network built in 1993 by health plans. We partner with payers and providers across the US. Our approach to EDI and customer service is different. If you’re interest in learning more, please contact us today.


How Does Your EDI Partner Stack Up? (Part 3 of 4)

4 Questions to Ask

Question 3: Are Providers Frequently Contacting You With Questions About Their Claims?

Health plans constantly seek to optimize their high-performing provider networks which provide value to members and patients. To grow these important networks, payers should nurture their provider relationships through personal attention and cutting edge technology.

This is particularly important at a time of mounting staffing shortages and rhetoric of economic downturns. Additionally, medical claim volume increased by 28% in 2022 as vaccines became available, medical offices reopened and pandemic regulations softened. When you add this up, the need for administrative simplification becomes more obvious for health plans and providers.

Tracking down claims, managing denials and submitting myriad claims can burden staff, compound labor costs and decrease profitability. When your provider network is stressed then your ability to grow as a carrier is impacted. Your EDI partner should automate workflows and manage your trading partner network so your support staff can focus on more strategic priorities, rather than answering phone calls and emails all day long.

Our third question addresses this concern as you ask yourself, “how does my EDI partner stack up?”

White paper

Ready to jump to all four questions? Want to see how your EDI partner stacks up? Download our white paper here.

Are Providers Frequently Contacting You With Questions About Their Claims?

When resources are tied up managing claim inquiries, you’re likely underperforming your peers and weakening your organization.

An inability to provide visibility to track and troubleshoot claims in a timely fashion can create financial implications. The increased demand on staff can decrease productivity, which could further delay payments and lead to staff burnout and turnover. Payers must respond to providers within a regulated timeframe, and providers rely on prompt payment for cashflows and their own business growth. Further dissatisfaction amongst providers and members can upend the collaborative nature of interoperability and could drive providers and members away to different plans.

The volume of inquiries to track down claims can burden staff and compound labor costs through the need to hire additional people. The situation can foster negativity between providers and operators, reducing satisfaction for both groups. Your EDI partner should work with you to increase your ability to automate claims processing. Part of this is facilitating a simple, electronic process for providers to submit their transactions and understand the status along the way.

UHIN is a national EDI network built in 1993 by health plans. We partner with payers and providers across the US. Our approach to EDI and customer service is different. If you’re interest in learning more, please contact us today.


How Does Your EDI Partner Stack Up? (Part 2 of 4)

4 Questions to Ask

Question 2: Can your Clearinghouse validate claims? Can you customize validation to your needs?

Claim validation should be par for the course. Still, many clearinghouses cannot properly validate claims. Much less, health plans are left unable to customize settings that allow for certain transactions while rejecting others. This leads to decreased adoption of auto-adjudication and on-going manual intervention that increases costs and decreases productivity.

SNIP Validation is a common solution for EDI data validation and compliance. There are seven (7) SNIP types and each health plan can tailor type settings to their needs. The right EDI partner works with their health plans to ensure the types are appropriately calibrated and implemented.

This leads to the second question to ask when wondering, “how does my EDI partner stack up?”

White paper

Ready to jump to all four questions? Want to see how your EDI partner stacks up? Download our white paper here.

Can your Clearinghouse validate claims? Can you customize validation to your needs?

Ensuring claims are HIPAA compliant and in a valid EDI format before they enter your system is key to streamlining the claims process.

Effective validation reduces administrative workload, mitigates risk of non-compliance, and helps avoid wasted time and provider appeals. SNIP Validation is an important step for pre-adjudication, scalability and profitable growth. Every plan operates at a different level of preparedness. One health plan may be working toward full automation, while another might seek to relieve staff burden to focus on other initiatives. Depending on your systems and goals, an EDI partner can support and modify the validation set-up to support your strategic needs.

SNIP Types

  1. EDI Standard Integrity Testing: Validates the basic syntactical integrity of the EDI submission.
  2. HIPAA Implementation Guide Requirement Testing: Involves testing for HIPAA implementation guide-specific syntax requirements.
  3. HIPAA Balance Testing: Involves ensuring that amounts reported in different places add up correctly.
  4. HIPAA Inter-Segment Situation Testing: Testing of specific intersegment situations described in the HIPAA implementation guides.
  5. HIPAA External Code Set Testing: Testing for valid implementation guide-specific code set values, as well as other code sets adopted as HIPAA standards.
  6. Product Type/Type of Service Testing: Ensures that the segments (records) of data that differ based on certain healthcare services are properly created and processed into claims data formats.
  7. Trading Partner-Specific Testing: The Implementation Guides contain some HIPAA requirements that are specific to Medicare, Medicaid, and Indian Health.

UHIN is a national EDI network built in 1993 by health plans. We partner with payers and providers across the US. Our approach to EDI and customer service is different. If you’re interest in learning more, please contact us today.


Prior Authorization Legislation and the X12 Winter Meeting

Image via X12

As an attendee of the X12 Winter Meeting this January, I noticed a difference compared to previous conferences. This year the primary focus was legislation, reviving past and pending transactions and standards legislation, and creating new legislative initiatives. There was discussion around the 5010 Standard currently in place that was mandated 13 years ago. That Standard is 20 years old now and is required only for a limited number of transactions.

UHIN Comments and the Path Forward

UHIN has spent a lot of time developing comments and reviewing the different options for moving forward with the currently pending version of the proposed rule for pre-auth for the 6020 Standard. That rule is officially known as “Administrative Simplification: Adoption of Standards for Health Care Attachments Transactions and Electronic Signatures, and Modification to Referral Certification and Authorization Transaction Standard.”

X12, WEDI, and Cooperative Exchange have each proposed solutions to help move this forward. What has been clear from all the industry groups is without a mandate, standards are further delayed, and if history repeats itself, the current proposed change will likely be out of date before it can be mandated.

How Payers Could Get Ahead of the Curve

Understandably, there’s hesitation to adopt a rule that’s not yet mandated. The current discussion would mandate the 6020 standard that is currently part of the proposed rule. However, payers may want to consider whether beginning implementation anyway could be the right course for them. There are advantages to doing so, including allowing operations to track closer to what we believe are best practices for your business. A methodology pivot may be necessary after the final rule is in place, but you’d be ahead of the curve.

In its fact sheet on the rule, CMS cites research by CAQH, which finds healthcare industry savings of $828 million per year could be achieved from the adoption of automated electronic processing of claims, including prior-auth and attachments. Of course, an industry-wide standard is a key pillar in supporting automation.

Clarification on Paper Claims

The federal government appears to be using prior-auth as a carrot to encourage providers to cut the fax and snail mail cords. CMS has published a helpful fact sheet on the rule. In the FAQs, it explains that providers who submit paper requests for pre-auth to payers are not subject to this HIPAA rule but, “The provider would be a covered entity if their paper claims were submitted to a health care clearinghouse or a billing service, and, on behalf of the provider, that health care clearinghouse or the billing service transformed them into standard electronic transactions and transmitted them to a health plan.”

The comment period for the currently pending attachments and prior-auth rule for the 6020 standard will close on March 21, 2023.

Working Toward a Universal Language

The best standards are those that scale. We think the currently proposed rule is an important step toward a universal language for interchange, and we look forward to moving 278s in a standard fashion in the future.

UHIN has been implementing standards since 1999, starting with the first national standard 4010, and continues to be the leader in Utah in setting standards.  We work with both health plans and providers to better understand pending legislation and standards.

If you’re interested in the output of our committee, which sets standards for all of Utah, click here to view our library on the UHIN Knowledge Center. You can reference a variety of information, including payer responsibilities associated with the current standards.

By Boyd Kreeck, Senior Technical Business Analyst, UHIN