Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Instructions: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations directly impact the delivery of health care services in the United States. For this paper, you will research HIPAA regulations and discuss the controls the federal government has put in place to protect personal health information.
Your paper should at very least cover the following:
Description and purpose of HIPAA
HIPAA privacy rule
General rule for patient authorization
Nursing homes and home care subject to HIPAA regulations
Confidentiality settings
How HIPAA affects employees
Your paper must be in proper APA format.
Your paper should be 3–5 pages, excluding the cover page, abstract page, and reference page.
Support your work with at least 4 academic or professional peer-reviewed sources that were published within the past 5 years
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
HIPAA was enacted by the US Congress in 1996 and signed the law by President Bill Clinton. The HIPAA was formulated to revise the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 with the aims of improving portability and stability of health insurance cover, expand and increase the access of long-term care services and coverage, to combat crimes against health delivery and health insurance, and streamline the administration of health insurance (Rothstein, 2013). As a non-discrimination rule within healthcare, it does not allow for any healthcare professional or organization to discriminate people against factors concerned with health like mental and physical conditions, medical history, preceding health administered, and information pertaining a person’s genetics. HIPAA provides for a uniform, privacy, and security of patients medical information throughout the country. HIPAA is significant in that privacy is a basic right of individuals. It varies across different states (Collmer, Millea, & Wearne, 2012).
Nursing homes and
home care must abide by the HIPAA regulations in revealing information about a
client. With the advancement in technology, facilities have integrated
electronic records. Electronic records have paved way for to information
pervasiveness and spread of important medical information (Kongstvedt,
2012).
Most details about the patients is shared on digital platforms to aid in the
privacy of patients. There are laws and regulations which state that health
care personnel to suffer consequences if they access patient’s information
without permission. With the help of HIPAA, there is adequate help on
determining how patient information is shared. It also discloses how
information is shared between health insurance companies. Therefore, patients
are obliged to be informed of their rights concerning how their information is
shared within the medical field (US Department of Health and Human
Services, 2016).
Lastly, any employee handling health-related information has to receive proper
training about HIPAA, therefore, with improper training or no training the
employee will be found accountable for the disclosure and can be sued by the
employee whose information is compromised.
References
Basile, J. L. (2014). An Empirical Investigation on Increasing HIPAA Compliance. New York: State University of New York at Buffalo.
Collmer, V., Millea, C., & Wearne, N. (2012). Guidelines for Improving Workplace Wellness. Health Law, 25, 44.
Hagler, T., & McKay, F. (2014). HIPAA & Workers’ Compensation: Three Myths you Shouldn’t Believe. Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, 103(4), 38.
Kongstvedt, P. R. (2012). Essentials of Managed Health Care. New York: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Rothstein, M. A. (2013). HIPAA Privacy Rule 2.0. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 41, 2, 525-528.
US Department of Health and Human Services. (2016). Health and Human Services. Retrieved July 10, 2016, from Health Information Privacy: http://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/
