ADA - American Dental Association

AHA - American Hospital Association - A health care industry association that represents the concerns of institutional providers.

AFEHCT - Association for Electronic Health Care Transactions

AMA - American Medical Association

ANSI -American National Standards Institute - The highest level national standards organization that coordinates voluntary standards in the United States.

ASC - Accredited Standards Committees - Accredited by ANSI to develop national standards for various industries.

ASC X12 - Subcommittee - Accredited by ANSI to develop national standards for various industries.

BCBSA - Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association

Claim Adjustment Reason Codes - A national administrative code set that identifies the reasons for any differences, or adjustments, between the original provider charge for a claim or service and the payer's payment for it.

Code Set - Under HIPAA, this is any set of codes used to encode data elements

Data Dictionary - A document or system that characterizes the data content of a system.

Data element - The smallest named unit of information in the ASC X12 standards. An element is almost always defined as variable length and may be optional or mandatory within the data segment.

Descriptor - The text defining a code in a code set

DHHS - Department of Health and Human Services

DISA - Data Interchange Standards Association

EDI - Electronic Data Interchange - Computer to computer exchange of machine-readable data in standard format

EFT - Electronic Funds Transfer

Federal Register - The document that has been signed into law

HCFA - Health Care Financing Administration

HCPCS - HCFA Common Procedural Coding - A medical code set that identifies health care procedures, equipment, and supplies for claim submission purposes.

HIAA - Health Insurance Association of America.

HHS - Department of Health and Human Services

HIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - Common name for Public law 104-191 containing government mandates for the health care industry, including EDI administrative simplification requirements

Implementation date - The date a covered entity must comply with a final rule compliance

JHITA - Joint Healthcare Information Technology Alliance

Local Code - A generic term for code values that are defined for a state or other political subdivision, or for a specific payer.

Maximum Defined Data Set - This is all of the required data elements for a particular standard based on a specific implementation specification.

MPI - Master Patient or Person Index

NCPDP - National Council for Prescription Drug Program

NDC - National Drug Codes

NMEH - National Medicaid EDI HIPAA

NPI - National Provider Identifier

NUBC - National Uniform Billing Committee - The organization generally recognized as the authority to determine data content, such as revenue codes for facility health care claims.

NUCC - National Uniform Claim Committee

Payer - An entity that assumes risk of paying for health care treatments.

SNIP - Strategic National Implementation Process

Standard setting organization - An organization accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) that develops and maintains standards for information transactions.

TAG - Technical Advisory Group

Transaction - The exchange of information between two parties to carry out financial or administrative activities related to healthcare, such as claims, remittance advice or an eligibility inquiry

VAN - Value Added Network

WEDI - Work Group for Electronic Data Interchange - A health care industry task force designated as an advisory group to DHHS under the HIPAA legislation.

X12 - An ANSI-accredited group that defines EDI standards for many American industries, including health care insurance.

X12N - A subcommittee of X12 that defines EDI standards for the insurance industry, including health care insurance.