Hospitals have a strong culture of protecting the privacy of patient information. All healthcare providers and healthcare workers should be aware of the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. (HIPAA) It is a law passed by Congress in 1996. It sets a national standard for protecting medical records and patient information.
HIPAA applies to all healthcare providers and covers all types of patient information, like oral, written and electronic. It is everybody’s responsibility to protect the patient’s information. According to the act, the wrongful disclosure of a patient’s healthcare information carries fines and can lead to jail. HIPAA gives patients the right to their health information.
HIPAA offers guidelines on how to process a patient’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to maintain the highest level of security and privacy. HIPAA compliance certification is not a federal requirement and does not provide the healthcare provider with any regulatory protection. A HIPAA compliance and verification means that the healthcare provider has completed the training that helps it to be HIPAA compliant or validate existing compliance.
Four main components of HIPAA
Privacy rule
This rule safeguards an individual’s health information and gives patients the right to access their health records. The rule protects Protected Health Information (PHI) that the healthcare providers hold or transmit in any form.
Security rule
This rule guides how to store, protect and manage health information in electronic form. It protects the availability, integrity and confidentiality of Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI).
Business associate agreement
This rule is designed to ensure that any business associate of the healthcare provider will have to follow the HIPAA regulations.
Breach notification rule
This rule provides instructions on the procedure to follow in case of a breach of unsecured Protected Health Information. (PHI). A breach usually happens when the PHI is shared in a way that is not allowed in the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
Facts about HIPAA
- Every covered entity must ensure ongoing HIPAA compliance. The term ‘covered entity’ includes hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, physician practices, dentists, psychologists, ambulatory surgery centres, lab technicians, schools with health services, government agencies involved in healthcare and nonprofits that provide healthcare services. It also covers government health programs, health insurance companies, employer-sponsored health plans and organisations that work with healthcare data.
- HIPAA regulations help to streamline the administrative healthcare procedures and increase the efficiency of the healthcare industry. Every healthcare provider should follow HIPAA compliance or face substantial fines.
- If the healthcare providers violate the HIPAA regulation, then, depending on the type of violation, providers could face fines up to $ 1.5 million per year. A failure to protect the patient’s data could cause the patient to lose trust. It can damage the patient’s reputation and affect patient care.
- The HIPAA compliance includes the technical, physical and administrative protections.
Technical protection
Health providers should encrypt and authenticate ePHI, implement access control, log changes to health information and ensure that users log off from the system after accessing the data.
Physical protection
Health providers should implement ways for monitoring and controlling all personnel who have access to the patient’s data. They must track and manage all devices which can access PHI remotely.
Administrative protection
Healthcare providers should ensure that every business associate signs a BAA, train staff on HIPAA regulations, track and record any security incidents and document a contingency plan.
- HIPAA is for protecting and managing the healthcare information of a specific individual. PHI includes information like a patient’s social security number, phone number and email address, health insurance numbers, chart numbers, lab results, photographs, biometric information and device identifiers and IP addresses.
- To be HIPAA compliant, the healthcare providers have to conduct and document annual audits. The audits are a physical site audit, an audit of all assets and devices, a security standards audit, a privacy assessment, a security risk assessment, HITECH subtitle D audit.
- All the staff members working in healthcare settings must be given annual HIPAA training along with security awareness training. They must understand the importance of HIPAA regulations..
- The remote working trend makes it difficult to ensure HIPAA compliance. For example, staff trained in data security on the company terminals may not know how to keep the same level of protection on their laptop at home. When employees are telecommuting, security protocols must be followed for all devices used to access healthcare information.
- To maintain HIPAA compliance effectively, the policies and procedures must be shared with all staff members. The patients should be given notice of privacy, which details how the provider will use their health information.
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