In 1998 the IRS agreed to the use of the Employer Identifier Number (EIN) as the identifying number for employers in electronic health care transactions under HIPAA.
The Employer Identification Number is defined as a character string of the following form: XX-XXXXXXX where each X is a digit character from 0 to 9 inclusive. Position 3 in the EIN field is the hyphen character. The EIN processing rules perform validation based on this definition.
The EIN is a data element required by the federal HIPAA legislation; its use is described in the Federal Register / Vol. 63, No. 115 / Tuesday, June 16, 1998. This section describes the EIN and its use in the health care system, as well as the functionality added to the Sybase HIPAA Accelerator maps.
A standard employer identifier is needed for electronic health transactions for several reasons:
Employers, as sponsors of health insurance for their employees, often need to be identified in health care transactions, and a standard identifier for employers is beneficial for transactions exchanged electronically.
Health care providers may need to identify the employer of the participant on claims submitted to health plans electronically.
Employers need to identify themselves in electronic transactions when they enroll or unenroll employees in a health plan or make premium payments to health plans on behalf of their employees.
Employers and health care providers may need to identify an employer as the source or receiver of information about a participant’s eligibility.
