The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a vital part of the health care industry’s day to day business. HIPAAs procedures define how healthcare companies receive and handle their clients’ health care information. HIPAA helps to protect the patient’s personal information through confidentiality and security procedures while being transferred, handled or shared with other healthcare providers (Modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification Rules, 2013). When a patient’s privacy is not regulated, third parties could buy and sell the information without the patients’ authorization. With HIPAA being in place, it prevents healthcare employees from divulging any patient information they …show more content…
Healthcare providers can assist in their HIPAA compliance by doing a protected health information inventory (PHI), having a security evaluation, conducting a risk analysis, creating a mitigation plan and an incident response plan (McNickle, 2012). Having a PHI inventory is a logical starting point which identifies the information assets that the company requires securing whether the information is electronic or on paper. Even though HIPAA only requires healthcare companies to cover electronic PHI, this process will how the company will collect, store, share, or dispose of the patient information. Having this inventory in place will also reveal any risks within the current system in place, exposing where a breach could occur. Implementing a security evaluation over the company’s security policies and procedures can be used to pinpoint any holes in the security system between the current protection and what is required by HIPAA. The policies and procedures should reflect any environmental changes as well as operational for an accurate analysis of the …show more content…
is a privately run home healthcare agency. Our company is operating in several locations in ten states, to date with over 40 agencies. We take confidentiality very seriously throughout all the departments of the company, making sure that the staff is aware of the policies and procedures that are put in place for assurance of our patients’ privacy. As I stated in my previous homework assignment, there are several departments within AngMar that handle different aspects of the healthcare process having the possibility of seeing patient information and there are compliance procedures set in place that are mandated by the company and the state in order to prevent any employees from sharing anyone’s private information. We work closely with Medicare and Medicaid in order to serve our patients, who are usually under a physician’s plan of care and need skilled nurses to assist them in their home (About Us, n.d.). One of the major concerns in our industry is preventing health care fraud. In the past AngMar has dealt with healthcare fraud from dealing with new acquisitions as well as with patients’ doctors accepting kickbacks. The patients and the healthcare providers are notified beforehand if there are any out of pocket expenses, according to HIPAA compliance. AngMar lets all employees know coming in that they will periodically do checks on the end users’ systems to make sure that they are not doing anything that will infect the
Unit 4 Assignment Introduction In a medical practice, ethical and legal issues can arise when any project is implemented. Projects that are to be implemented require the legal team to review prior to being implemented. Ethical and Legal issues that could arise once the Arcadia HealthCare Solutions Integration Project goes live into a production environment include privacy, encryption, as well as trust. The issues can be both ethical and legal.
You are correct Vaschar, the HIPAA privacy rule does play a big part in the role of keeping patient information secure. In the instance when a patients information is given to a fellow medical provider for continuity of care to establish a consult appointment is not an issue, but should that patients medical records need to be released between the medical provider and the other provider of care a medical records release authorization should be signed by either the patient or the patients representative. In the case where a medical provider wishes to distribute a product for another company it can do so without any HIPAA violation just as long as it does not pass on any patient demographic or patient care information to the company. If
The purpose of the HIPAA transactions and code set standards is to simplify the processes and decrease the costs associated with payment for health care services. The transactions and code set standards apply to patient-identifiable health information transmitted electronically. Physician practices will continue to be able to submit paper claims. When the regulations take effect in October 2002, standard formats and code sets will take the place of any payer-specific or location-specific formats or requirements. ICD-9-CM Volume 1 and 2: Diagnosis Coding - ICD-9-CM is used to code and classify morbidity data from the inpatient and outpatient records, physician offices, and most National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) surveys.
The walls in the office of healthcare providers are made sound proof by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). Sound proof meaning that each patient’s healthcare information can only be shared between the provider and the patient; their information is required to remain confidential by law. In 1996, HIPPA was passed by congress; the act included regulations that would help to protect patient privacy and health information (Petersen, 2001). After reading the novel, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot one may be appalled and think that what occurs in the novel is a complete violation of HIPPA. But, the time frame needs to be taken into consideration.
Since HIPAA become mandatory on most of the health care organization, patient information is more secure compared to previous. Health care organization are investing huge amount of fund for safety measures to protect the patient information and i think this is the main concern in today's advanced health care
HIPAA Summary In 2009, the Congress created an act called Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It is designed when people became concern about his or her personal information being stolen. With the media growing every day, it has become easier for people to hack into computer take identities and putting others at risk. The federal government made HIPAA way to reduce company’s downfalls and financial crisis due to theft.
The first article was a summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. In the article, there was an introduction on what HIPAA meant and its importance. First off, HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and it is a disclosure of patient information so that it is protected from unknown individuals and to assure that health providers abide by the privacy rule. Some key facts about HIPAA were, who was covered, what information is protected, and administrative requirements. Noncompliance and criminal penalties were some of the critical issues found in the article.
The importance of HIPAA compliance in medical transcription lies in the fact that it ensures confidentiality of patient information in accordance with law. The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Privacy Rule, approved by the U.S. Congress in 1996, establishes identifiable policies for the exposure and utilization of an individual patient's health details. HIPAA stipulates non-disclosure of protected health information (PHI) without the patient's permission, for healthcare requirements, national interests and public benefits. It also seriously investigates compliance associated problems. Why HIPAA Medical Transcription Services are Important Medical Ethics and Appropriate Treatment - The first reason is that medical
Unfortunately HIPAA violations happen every year in our country. In fact, a situation happened in a New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center on May 7th 2010. The HIPAA violation happened after the electronic health records of 6,800 patients ended up on Google for the world to see. The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who are responsible for HIPAA enforcement laws deeply investigated this case. It was discovered that a Columbia University physician who developed applications for New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University, attempted to deactivate a personally owned computer server on the network containing electronic protected health information (ePHI).
As records were shared electronically rules were implemented for clinicians to follow known as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (Summary of the HIPAA Security Rule ,2013). These rules were implemented for clinicians to protect the
The goals of HIPAA are to ensure medical coverage scope for workers and their families when they change or lose their employments and to secure wellbeing information trustworthiness, classification, and accessibility. The objectives are also to enhance our health care framework by making it more proficient, less difficult, and less
Because of this, HIPAA also include mandates to set standards for transmitting electronic health data including administrative and financial data relating to patient health information. This was to promote the increase use of computers in healthcare industries, and once again the states came up with their own laws to enforce security and privacy over medical information. This would be later be standardize by federal laws with the introduction of Privacy Rule and Security Rule, which is what most people associate or knows HIPAA as. HIPAA has five Titles with a specific purpose to address a specific issue. Here are the summary and main points for each that one should know in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the need for
Finally, this violation reaffirms the need to conduct a HIPAA Risk Analyses, including monitoring the privacy/breach rule. Use your policies and procedures for efficient and effective training, auditing and
This interoperability weave is crucial in facilitating communication across provider organizations involved in patient care through secure and reliable information exchange. • RECs provide support for privacy and security of health information. Ensuring privacy and security is vital in building trust in order to realize the potential benefits of health information exchange. If there are perceived or actual risks in the accuracy and completeness of health information, individual’s willingness to disclose necessary health information may be tampered with. • Assistance in workflow redesign and analysis • Training in EHR: selection, implementation, support, project management and financial consultation.
HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and it was passed with broad bipartisan congressional support in 1996. At the time the legislation was enacted, most behavioral health and human service providers were focused on three important provisions of HIPAA. The reason why HIPPA mandate that providers and contractors use the approve coded is because the health care industry deals with lot of sensitive client information in the healthcare field. Consumer population is highly sensitive about the release of information. The nature of most of our consumers ' problems lends itself to suspicion and a need for verification has to be done.