The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandated standard formats for many healthcare administrative transactions, but it did not specify the mechanics how those transactions should be exchanged. In order to close this gap, NEHEN develops tools to standardize the communications among its members and between its members and their major non-NEHEN trading partners. This core NEHEN technology supports the exchange of health care transactions in a low cost, reliable, standardized manner. NEHEN develops technology in accordance with current and emerging communications standards and strives to lead the country towards healthcare administrative simplification.

• NEHEN runs as a distributed, peer-to-peer network
  • No central data center or data store
  • NEHEN technology runs at every member site
• NEHEN Member systems are responsible for creating transactions according to the national standards
  • NEHEN technology handles routing and delivery
• NEHEN supports diverse legacy and Internet formats for telecommunications
• NEHEN builds and supports common services to lower the cost of payer/provider electronic communications
• NEHEN encourages the use of lowest cost delivery mechanisms
  • Enables direct connectivity whenever possible, eliminating "middle men"
  • Uses the Internet as much as possible
• NEHEN requires minimal intrusion into participant information technology agendas

In addition, NEHEN has developed a suite of tools that allows its members to create and send the real time HIPAA transactions to all NEHEN and other connected payers from a single application. This tool suite supplements traditional hospital and practice information systems and allows members to take advantage of the HIPAA electronic transactions without waiting for upgrades of the traditional systems.