The Health Insurance Portability and accountability Act (HIPPA) give regulations for the protection of health information about patients. However, whenever a patient goes to a hospital or any other medical institution, a medical professional accesses the medical information of the concerned party with ease. Therefore, there comes a concern that if the medical professional can easily access the information, so can hackers. Therefore, patients need more protection that what the HIPPA currently offers.
Thus, the most significant area is security. Stakeholders should protect records in any field from access by unauthorized persons. There are numerous reports that government records get hacked. Therefore, the security of medical records in electronic form should be a major concern to all stakeholders. Just like any other record, both governmental and non-governmental, electronic medical records are vulnerable to hackers. Since a major HIPPA drive is confidentiality, security of the records is a great concern (Dudley, 2012).
In my role as a nurse, the HIPPA will affect me in a number of ways with advanced training. First, it will teach me to have more respect to the rights of the patient than before. The Act states that no medical personnel should violate any right of any patient. If the Act is fully implemented, the training that I will undergo will help me to communicate in a better and easier way to the patient than how I presently communicate.
Furthermore, under the act, there is a provision that states that medical personnel should “keep phone conversations private” (Osborne, 2010). Therefore, as a nurse, I will have to be more discrete whenever I am talking to a patient through the phone. Also, the Act will affect my way of keeping charts that belong to patients. The provision in the Act states that all medical personnel must “keep charts confidential” (Osborne, 2010). With the expected training, I will learn to keep the charts more confidential than I, usually, do.
References
Dudley, G. (2012, December). Electronic Medical Records Need More Protection. Retrieved from http://www.psqh.com/octdec04/dudley.html
Osborne, H. (2010, September). How the New HIPAA Regulations Affect Healthcare Communication - Health Literacy. Retrieved from http://www.healthliteracy.com/article.asp?PageID=3789
