HIPAA Compliance Report

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

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is United States legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. No one is completely perfect but we do have to be really careful with how in the medical field we take care of the medical record or any other information that should not be given. All that information must be kept private unless the patient of the information gives any authorization for it to be release. Even the most important hospitals or well-known physicians have or been involved with a HIPAA violation.

Health information technology can advance the health of individuals and aid with the performance of providers to produce and improve quality and cost savings in patients’ health. In 2009, Congress passed, and former President Obama signed into law the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Buntin, Burke, Hoaglin and Blumenthal, 2011). Authorized by the HITECH Act, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) has worked on health IT. The Health IT created legislation and regulations to provide requirements and certification criteria that the EHRs must meet to ensure health care

Information security considered as the procedure of protecting information against unauthorized access, disclosure, disruption, modification, use, or destroyed. In other word information security include defending information whatever the form this data may take. Although each organization employ information security to protect its secret data, but security breaches or identity theft may take place, security breach mean illegal access to defined categories of personal information. In other word it mean illegal access to personal information to use, destroy or amend it (Cate, 2008, p.4).

The electronic transactions that are covered by the rules are: Claims, Payment, Claim Status, Eligibility, Referral Certification and Coordination of Benefits. HIPAA may refer to code sets as medical codes or nonmedical codes. Typically maintained by professional organizations or other organizations.

(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.

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). Due to lack of technical

This rule adopts standards for eight electronic transactions and for code sets to be used in those transactions. It also contains requirements concerning the use of these standards by health plans, health care clearinghouses, and certain health care providers.

When entering a patient 's room, remember to close the door behind. If the door is left open, people walking by the room could possibly over hear the conversation. This could lead to a potential violation of HIPAA.

Federal agencies and private businesses developed conversion tools to aid in the transition (crosswalks and mapping). There are also a few specific guidelines to follow when coding for ICD-10 such as in the selection for the full code. The coder needs to first check the tabular list to know whether or not a 7th character is required. If a dash is included then additional characters is required there is a dash at the end of an alphabetic index entry. If there is not a dash it is still important to be sure by checking the tabular list. ICD-10 diagnoses codes can have three, four, five, six, or even seven characters versus the five in ICD-9. Some of the new features found in ICD-10 are:

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 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.)

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