Accountability Act (HIPAA) Of 1996

Healthcare providers rely on ethical codes to establish guidelines and standards for addressing issues that arise. Associations representing the professional organization are tasked with the duty of developing and tailoring a code of ethics to assist its members to understand expectations in their professional role. For example the American Health Information Management Association and the American Physical Therapist Association established a code of ethics for its members. Each association considers the relation of the health professional obligations and constructs a code of ethics to serve as guidance to the professional.

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

HIPAA is the law that must be followed by all healthcare personnel at every level, both professional and non-professional. Any companies that provide services to healthcare providers must follow HIPAA. HIPAA is a set of basic national privacy standards and information practices. The purpose of it is to protect the privacy of all patients and residents of the United States who receive any kind of healthcare services. Patients can enjoy protection and peace about their healthcare information due to HIPAA (Rorer ). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act provides standardized patients health, administrative, and financial information, and provides protection and security of confidential patient health information. It protects medical

(September 30, 2013) - The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published amended rules applicable to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 in January 2013. As explained by the Secretary of HHS, healthcare has experienced significant changes since HIPAA was enacted in 1996. The implementation of electronic medical records is just one of those changes. The new HIPAA regulations are designed to provide patients with better privacy protection, and additional rights not included in the original HIPAA rules. The new rules became effective on Sept. 23, 2013.

HIPAA is short for health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996. They have many requirement that’s a medical assistant could have and use to become a better assistant. They have many requirements that the policy requires covered encounters by taking reasonable steps: covered entry to develop and implement policies for its own organization. Reflecting the business practices and work force.

If you work in healthcare, anywhere from a small medical office to a big hospital to an insurance company, you need to be in compliance with HIPAA. This is a long, complicated document and even big insurance companies struggle to keep the rules fresh in everyone 's mind and everyone on top of the most critical functions. Here are a few things to make sure you are doing right:

Health care includes preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, rehabilitative, maintenance, or palliative care, and counseling, services, assessment, or procedure with respect to the physical or mental condition, or functional status of an individual. Health Care Clearinghouse, Businesses that process or facilitate the processing of health information received form other businesses. It includes groups such as physician and hospital billing services. Health Plans, Individuals or group plans that provide or pay the cost of medical care and includes both Medicare and Medicaid programs. HIPAA protects an individual’s health information and their demographic information. This is called protected health information or PHI. Information meets the definition of PHI if, even without the patient’s name, if you look at certain information and you can tell who the person is then it is PHI. The PHI can relate to past, present or future physical or mental health of the individual. PHI describes a disease, diagnosis, procedure, prognosis, or condition of the individual and can exist in any medium files, voice mail, email, fax, or verbal communications. defines information as protected health information if it contains the following information about the patient, the patient’s household members, or the patient’s employers, Names, Dates relating to a patient, i.e. birth dates, dates of medical treatment, admission and discharge dates, and dates of death, Telephone numbers, addresses (including city, county, or zip code) fax numbers and other contact information, Social Security numbers, Medical records numbers, Photographs, Finger and voice prints, Any other unique identifying

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

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets security standards for safeguarding important patient health information that is being stored and maintained in analog and digital forms. As new technologies continue to facilitate the healthcare industry’s transition to paperless processes, health care providers, insurance companies, and other institutions are also growing increasingly dependent on electronic information systems to manage their HIPAA compliance programs. As a result, the safety and security of sensitive health data has become a major concern across the board.

The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule requires HIPAA covered entities and their business associates to provide notification following a breach of unsecured protected health information. Similar breach notification provisions implemented and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), apply to vendors of personal health records and their third party service providers, pursuant to section 13407 of the HITECH Act. . ("Privacy HHS.gov," n.d.)

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. Medical facilities improved responsibility when it came to their client’s medical history.

HIPAA is legislation that is mostly used in United States for the protection and privacy of the patient’s information. The medical information is protected by HIPAA whereby it ensures safe access to health and other personal information. HIPAA is therefore divided into five rules and regulations. There is private rule which ensures that all the information about individual’s health is highly protected. Private rule allows a good flow of health care information to ensure that an individual gets the best quality health care. Private rule permits the access of the important information while keeping top security and privacy of treatment details of the patient. Security rule is also a rule found in HIPAA whereby it has administrative and technical guards which are responsible in ensuring that there is confidentiality and integrity of the information which is stored electronically. Security rule also requires physical safeguarding to offer

The HIPAA rule is built to protect and prevent disclosing individuals’, and consumers’ identifiable health care information unlawfully and without getting authority from the concern parties. If someone break the law, individuals are subject to civil penalties of $100 on each violation but the penalty can accumulates based on numbers of violations; the standard maximum limit of civil penalties is $25,000 each person, each year (HIPAA Privacy Rule – What Employers Need to Know, n. d.). As per stacking rules, if a person violated two HIPAA standards, the penalty can be $50,000; Similarly, the criminal penalties subject to maximum of $ 250,000 and ten years in prison can be imposed to those individuals and parties who disclosed protected information

Put in place in 2003, it was designed to protect patient privacy, informed consent, and how records can be stored and used. Although this law was created with good intentions, it has many negative effects. These negative effects were summarized in the documentary by Dr. Pomeranz, "HIPPA is trying to guarantee patient safety, but in doing so, they're killing the team and killing the relationship" (McGarry, 2013). As discussed in class, HIPPA limits communication that may save lives, and this limitation on communication is what Dr. Pomeranz is indicating as killing the team. Since violating HIPPA is a criminal offense and the rules of the law are too confusing, organizations tend to lean toward the side of caution and limit communication. This limit on communication slows research, workflow, and efficiency. Dr. Deeb Salem shared an example about a patient who underwent a cardiac transplantation and two days later the care team was informed that the donors blood revealed bacteremia. The doctors contacted the hospital who had cared for the, now-deceased, donor in an attempt to confirm the identity of bacterium so that proper antibiotics could be used. Although time was crucial for the recipient, the donor's hospital stated that providing such information would violate HIPAA, since the hospital did not have authorization from the donor (Salem, 2003). Confronting the issues with HIPPA is necessary in order to avoid situations as such and increase overall communication between medical

Current use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has proven to be helpful for hospitals and independent medical practice to provide efficient care for patients. Balestra reports that using computers to maintain patient health records and care reduces errors, and advances in health information technology are saving lives and reducing cost (Balestra, 2017). As technology advances EHR are going to continue to be the main method of record keeping among medical providers. Therefore, staff and medical providers need to be trained on how to properly share patients EHR safely and in a secure form in order to maintain patient confidentiality. 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