BCBSLA Taps SeeBeyond To Prepare for HIPAA

In preparation for pending HIPAA regulations, Baton Rouge-based Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana (BCBSLA) has chosen SeeBeyond's (Redwood Shores, CA) eBI Suite to link its disparate systems and provide for a HIPAA-compliant data transfer. According to Brian Lawrence, implementation manager, BCBSLA, HIPAA legislation mandates specific transactions for transferring data between trading partners and business entities. "BCBSLA needed to integrate EDI HIPAA-mandated X.12 transactions into our legacy internal format. BCBSLA could have either modified our legacy system to handle HIPAA standard formats, or create a translation wrapper to manipulate incoming transactions into our internal formats," says Lawrence. "BCBSLA chose the translation wrapper method to save costs and effort."

Deloitte Consulting (New York) assisted BCBSLA in the selection process, and also is helping with the SeeBeyond suite's implementation. "We evaluated a number of vendors," says I-Ping Li, implementation manager, Deloitte Consulting. "SeeBeyond best fit our HIPAA-compliant approach. Their distributed network architecture will provide for future scalability."

The integrated security within the product and its ability to handle batch and real-time processing within one product instead of multiple products also contributed to BCBSLA's and Deloitte's choice of the product, Lawrence adds. BCBSLA currently is in the proof-of-concept stage and is working on the prototype, according to Lawrence. The expected completion date for HIPAA-compliant transactions is June 2002.