What You Should Know About HIPAA and HIPAA Compliance

1. everything you should know about HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It's a federal law enacted in 1996 as an attempt at incremental medical care reform and specialists believe it to be the most important healthcare legislation since Medicare in 1965. HIPAA's intent would be to reform the healthcare sector by reducing costs, simplifying administrative processes and burdens, technology and compliance and improving privacy and safety of patient's information. There are two separate and distinct legislation that fall under the HIPAA umbrella: HIPAA Privacy and HIPAA Security. HIPAA Privacy relates to the privacy and protection of individuals' protected health information (PHI) while HIPAA security relates to the protection and privacy of individuals' protected health information in electronic form (ePHI). HIPAA Privacy is what most of us think about when we hear the expression HIPAA ( HIPAA Awareness Training, Notice of Privacy Practices, Authorization forms, etc )whereas HIPAA Security will be more the focus of an organization's IT department since it deals with encryption, electronic security, disaster recovery, etc.. Do you have to be worried about HIPAA? There are two main classifications under HIPAA: Covered Entities and Business Associates. Covered Entities are those types of organizations/individuals that deal directly with secure health information and include health care providers, medical insurance providers, and employer sponsored group health plans. how does hipaa compliance effect technology Anyone outside of these categories is considered a business associate. Business associates include medical billing companies, medical storage, advertising organizations, software providers, medical device manufacturers, etc..