Issue date: 3/4/08 Section: Campus

A survey authored by the Student Health Advisory Committee revealed that discrepancies in Northwestern health care policies and private policies discourage students from going to NU Health Service for care.

Because Health Service falls under an exception to the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), students who are not covered by the NU health insurance plan face obstacles to obtaining prescription medications and other services offered at Searle Hall.

NU is instead compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which allows university health care services to operate outside of HIPAA requirements. To qualify for this, the health center must treat only students, excluding university employees from on-campus health care.

"The real issue is third-party billing," said Donald Misch, executive director of Health Service. "When you're not HIPAA compliant, you can't easily bill insurance companies and it gets harder to work with vendors. That means when you come in, if you get Gardasil or medications, you gotta pay cash."

All NU students must have health insurance but are free to choose between their family's policy and the NU policy with The Chickering Group, a Massachusetts-based health insurance company. Statistics from the Office of Risk Management report that of the 5,347 students covered by NU's insurance plan, only 1,078 of those are undergraduate students. The rest are graduate students, who are less likely to still be covered by a family health insurance plan, said Christopher Johnson, NU's director of risk management and safety.

Students who do not have insurance through NU can receive a receipt for services which they may submit to their private insurance companies. The majority of health care facilities, from clinics and hospitals to private doctors and many other university health services, are HIPAA compliant. The act outlines national standards for the electronic transfer of medical data, which would expedite the process of filing separate insurance claims.

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