The act of health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) covers the health insurance of workers and their families in the event of change or loss of job, reduces care fraud and abuse, and it requires confidential handling and protection of health information. This act that was passed by Congress in 1996 has a broad impact on virtually all health providers as well as on the state health policy (Fisher Wilson, 2006). Furthermore, it affects insurers and health consumers.
Effects of HIPAA on firms within a particular industry or market segment
Lack of compliance with set standards
The act of health insurance portability and accountability provides standards that are at times difficult to apply due to the complexity of health information management thereby forcing health information management to interpret the rules for themselves. These result to the cause of delays of medical treatments due to misinterpretation and inconsistent applications thus compromising health care industry.
High costs to health care institutions.
The legislation ensures a direct cost to a patient which is minimal since the patient is only charged for copying and postage costs for delivering of documents by health care institutions. As opposed to patients, the costs are high to healthcare providers which may eventually cause strain to the budget. As a result of this, hospitals and some clinics have had to reconstruct or remodel existing registration areas just to comply with HIPAA’s privacy regulations (Li, Zou, Liu & Chen, 2011).
Barrier in medical research
According to the findings by the Association of Academic Health Centers, HIPAA regulations impose obstacles to research involving human subject by prohibiting the sharing of data within the study. The imposed barriers may include; delays from institutional review board modifications, the difficulty of getting de-identified data and subject paperwork and having to work within multi-site studies.
Hampered patient care
HIPAA privacy rule has made it difficult for the health care providers to share freely patient information between them since each patient has to give an implicit permission first. Thus, resulting in more time taken before critical information is obtained thereby affecting the patient.
References
Fisher Wilson, J. (2006). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule Causes Ongoing Concerns among Clinicians and Researchers. Annals Of Internal Medicine, 145(4), 313. http://dx.doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-145-4-200608150-00019
Li, F., Zou, X., Liu, P., & Chen, J. (2011). New threats to health data privacy. BMC Bioinformatics, 12(Suppl 12), S7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-12-s12-s7
