Delta Dental Plan on New Jersey implements HIPAA compliance

Concurrent Technologies Corp. (www.concurrenttechnologies.com), a leading e-business solutions development and compliance company, has announced that it has completed a HIPAA-compliance support implementation for Delta Dental Plan of New Jersey, Inc. (Delta Dental), one of the Northeast's largest dental healthcare plans.

The custom development of Benefits Connection, the health plan's online benefits management applications suite, was a major component of the engagement. Benefits Connection now provides plan subscribers and dental professionals with HIPAA-compliant Internet access to plan services, as well as to details regarding many aspects of their dental coverage, which were stored in the company's existing mainframe systems. Concurrent Technologies (Concurrent) completed the data analysis, infrastructure enhancement and portal communication implementation to support HIPAA-compliant eligibility inquiries, claim status inquiries and associated responses.

"Concurrent played an essential role in helping us transform our infrastructure and online presence to support HIPAA-compliant transactions," said Steve Stoll, Vice President of Information Services of Delta Dental. "Due to the fact that Concurrent effectively handled our requirements for Internet applications that interface with our external constituencies, Delta Dental was able to focus on other areas of its business to address customer needs."

Concurrent first analyzed the data stored in Delta Dental's mainframe systems and databases in order to build the transactions to meet the eligibility and claim status formats for HIPAA compliance. This critical activity ensured that complete and accurate data were communicated between the local health plan's existing systems and the Internet. Additionally, Concurrent consultants, programmers and analysts completed the data mapping and standardization of code sets. Once the transactions were built, Concurrent participated as testing partners with Delta Dental to verify that the transactions could be securely exchanged on a test platform before migration to production.

Prior to delivering the solution for Delta Dental, Concurrent evaluated software products designed to support the creation of valid transactions. Concurrent conducted a Proof of Concept (POC), completing a comparative analysis of a number of software products based upon ease of use, ability to communicate data effectively across a variety of platforms, scalability, portability and cost. As a result of the POC, Concurrent recommended Novell's exteNd(tm) Application Server and Composer(tm) products as the best choice for Delta Dental.

"Facing impending HIPAA compliance deadlines, all segments of our country's healthcare delivery system need to address critical components of their technical infrastructure in order to support secure, compliant transactions and Web-based data accessibility," states Michael Shirzad, President of Concurrent Technologies. "Concurrent's extensive expertise and resources uniquely position the company to help payers, providers, hospitals and other industry stakeholders achieve compliance throughout their entire operations."

Concurrent Technologies provides comprehensive HIPAA-compliance consulting, implementation and support services, including infrastructure assessment, gap analysis, remediation and systems design. Committed to safeguarding client investments in their existing systems and databases, Concurrent Technologies utilizes industry standards such as XML for data definition and transfer, and leverages flexible, reusable solutions that can fit a business as it changes and grows.