What You Should Know About Hipaa and Hipaa Compliance

HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a federal law enacted in 1996 as an attempt at incremental health care reform and experts consider it the most significant health care legislation since Medicare in 1965. HIPAA intent is to reform the health sector, reducing costs, streamlining processes, and administrative costs, and improve the privacy and security of patient information. There are two separate and distinct laws that fall under the HIPAA umbrella: HIPAA Privacy and HIPAA security. HIPAA Privacy relates to the protection and confidentiality of individuals ‘protected health (PHI), while the HIPAA security concerns the security and confidentiality of individuals’ protected health in electronic form (EPHI). HIPAA Privacy is what most of us think when we hear the term HIPAA (HIPAA Awareness Training, Notice of Privacy Practices, authorization forms, etc.), while HIPAA security tends to be more to the center of an organization’s IT department because is encryption, electronic security, disaster recovery, etc. Do not worry about HIPAA? There are two main classifications in which HIPAA: Covered Entities and business associates. Institutions concerned are the types of organizations / individuals that deal directly protected health information and consist of health service providers, providers of health insurance and employer sponsored group health plans. Nobody outside of these categories is considered a business partner. Business associates include billing companies medical, storage, marketing organizations, software companies, medical device manufacturers, etc. While the DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services) guidelines on such entities, co-workers are regulated by covered entities with which they work through a business associate agreement (alternatively called a business associate agreement). HIPAA compliance involves two main components: a training HIPAA welfare of employees and other implementation processes, procedures and related forms of HIPAA. While a lot of HIPAA regulations may seem common sense, think of them as only provide a certain level of standardization so individuals and organizations involved in their care can know what to expect from each other. HIPAA compliance should not be a complicated process and once the setup program may be relatively little effort to maintain.