Alternative Link was founded by Melinna Giannini, an insurance agent and third party administrator who designed and sold self-funded medical plans and monitored employer claim funds. In 1995, Giannini recognized the need for an NCQA-certified network of integrative healthcare practitioners, including acupuncturists, bodyworkers, chiropractors, holistic physicians, homeopaths, ethnic and minority healthcare professionals, massage therapists, midwives, naturopaths, nurses, oriental medicine practitioners, osteopaths, somatic educators, spiritual healers and others.

As she explored methods of contracting with such practitioners, Giannini discovered a critical and missing element of the national health information infrastructure (NHII): codes that characterized integrative healthcare interventions. She knew these codes were essential to the financing, administration and delivery of healthcare, especially in areas other than conventional physician-driven medical practices. Giannini also knew that incomplete, inaccurate and imprecise coding resulted in misleading data that sometimes led policymakers to make harmful policy decisions. Without proper attention, the gap in coding and the NHII was resulting in suboptimal healthcare access, quality and cost-management—and, tragically, lost lives.

Through third parties, Giannini approached existing coding authorities and encouraged them to accelerate development of effective codes for integrative healthcare. One such authority, the American Medical Association (AMA) served “allopathic” medical doctors and focused on Western, or conventional, medical practices. The other coding authority, the Health Care Financing Administration (now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), served the elderly, disabled and impoverished. Neither coding authority was willing to take on the project of characterizing thousands of interventions in areas of alternative medicine, nursing and other integrative healthcare practices, and then assigning unique codes (digitized information) to support more cost-effective healthcare research, management and commerce.

Giannini recognized a need to build integrative healthcare codes from scratch to meet existing industry needs. These codes were essential under new federal legislation—the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996—that called for administrative simplification in healthcare through standardized transactions and code sets.

To fill NHII gaps, and build a HIPAA-compliant code set, Giannini assembled a team, raised funding and created a new coding authority. The resulting company, Alternative Link, had no special interests that might otherwise limit or unduly influence the direction or depth of code development. It assigned codes impartially, based on the official terminology of the integrative healthcare professions, not on the medical establishment’s acceptance or the national prevalence of the encoded interventions. This open and impartial code development process resembled that of the Uniform Code Council, the group that assigned Universal Product Codes in the retail industry. That is, like UPCs, Alternative Link’s new ABC codes for integrative healthcare were assigned to reflect actual healthcare practices, not just those preferred in Western medicine or by conventional physicians.

Alternative Link’s code development process has evolved over time. Early on, most practitioners of alternative medicine, nursing and other integrative healthcare practices were "gun shy" of coding authorities. Many of these practitioners had developed a healthy mistrust of mainstream approaches to financing, administration and delivery of care because these practices were largely controlled by special interests with financial and political reasons to disenfranchise practitioners other than conventional medical doctors.

Alternative Link took painstaking steps to earn the trust of the integrative healthcare community and to secure nomenclature from practitioners that accurately reflects their practices. Alternative Link relied on exploratory interviews, informal surveys and case studies in the early days. Later, as productive working relationships developed, Alternative Link conducted systematic research using more formal data collection instruments and the input of degree-granting academic institutions, practitioner associations, experts in each field, state licensing boards, and national testing and credentialing authorities.

Once the major fields of integrative healthcare had been largely characterized, Alternative Link sought additional industry input from subject matter experts in areas such as coding, billing, claims management, health plan design, utilization management, credentialing, pricing, contracting, clinical practice management, outcomes research, actuarial analyses, information management, supply chain management, healthcare administration, health law, health policy and health industry evolution. The result was a set of more than 4,000 ABC codes that described a broad variety of integrative healthcare practices to support the financing, administration and delivery of best practices among conventional, complementary and alternative approaches to care.

In 1999, Alternative Link secured initial funding for a non-profit foundation and began planning the coordination of terminology development through this 501(c)(3) organization, The Foundation for Integrative Healthcare, and its practitioner association constituents (called Member Associations). FIHC was charged with systematically updating and expanding the terminology behind ABC codes to ensure the code set would remain complete, accurate and precise as healthcare practices evolved.

Today, Alternative Link offers a variety of information products and consulting services essential to the efficient functioning of the national health information infrastructure, so that more consumers can gain access to the right care in the right place at the right time, at a justifiable cost.