The United States Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has published the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register to implement Section 6403 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Section 6403 will eliminate duplicative data reporting and access requirements between the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) and the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank (HIPDB), and to streamline Data Bank operations. Comments can be made at http://www.npdb-hipdb.hrsa.gov/news/news.jsp#NPRMHipdb. with public comment open until April 16, 2012.
Section 6403 requires the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish a transition period to transfer all data in the HIPDB to the NPDB and, once completed, to cease HIPDB operations. Information previously collected and disclosed through the HIPDB will then be collected and disclosed through the NPDB. The statute's intent is to transition HIPDB operations to the NPDB while maintaining reporting and querying requirements.