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Enacted
by Congress in 1996, the HIPAA Act included a series of "administrative
simplification" provisions that required the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) to adopt national standards for electronic health care transactions.
Responsible
health care providers and businesses already take many of the kinds of steps
required by the rule to protect patients’ privacy. Covered
entities of all types and sizes are required to comply with the final Privacy
Rule. To ease the burden of
complying with the new requirements, the Privacy Rule gives needed flexibility
for providers and plans to create their own privacy procedures, tailored
to fit their size and needs. The
scalability of the rules provides a more efficient and appropriate means
of safeguarding Personal health information than would any single standard.
How
will this improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our health care system? By
ensuring consistency throughout the industry, these national standards will
make it easier for health plans, physicians, hospitals and other health care
providers to process claims and other transactions electronically. This
consistency is badly needed to correct the countless variations that health
claims are now processed. It
is particularly important when considering the electronic age in which we
live.
The
other key component of HIPAA, requiring security and privacy standards, has
been created in order to protect personal health information. It
is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the ideas of security and
privacy apply only to a written document. Keep
in mind that what you say to another person about a patient is just
as protected as what you write or send electronically. This
is a key HIPAA term: Protected
health information (PHI) which is the HIPAA term for health information
in any form (i.e., paper, electronic or verbal) that personally identifies
a patient.
In
December 2000 HHS issued a final rule to protect confidentiality of medical
records and other personal health information. Note: After
soliciting public comment on the final rule, HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson
allowed it to take effect as scheduled, with compliance for most covered
entities required by April 14, 2003. (Small
health plans have an additional year.) More
information on the privacy rule is available at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa.
Ulrich Medical Concepts
is committed to HIPAA compliance. We will take every step
necessary to ensure that our software is HIPAA compliant and that
our customers understand the ramifications of HIPAA, both for their
practice and our software, the Team Chart
Concept.
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HIPAA
